


100 Situations

by Zhelana



Category: seaQuest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-03-28 03:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 95
Words: 24,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13895568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zhelana/pseuds/Zhelana
Summary: These are a series of short stories based on the prompts in the 100_situations community on livejournal. They each stand alone, although some of them are connected. They take place in first season seaQuest.





	1. Tired

The alarm blared. Bleary eyed, Lucas swatted at it, temporarily making it turn off. Today was a big day. It was the first day he was an official UEO employee instead of just a kid hitching a ride on a submarine. He was supposed to report to Katie Hitchcock at 7am promptly. He had set his alarm promptly, but then insomnia had hit, and he had spent the night talking to Wolfman on the InterNex. For the third time, his alarm sounded. “Okay okay okay,” he muttered, throwing his legs out of bed. He stumbled a few steps then opened his closet door. He tossed his lucky Marlin’s Jersey and a pair of jeans on his bed and got changed. Then he stumbled to the cafeteria and grabbed some scrambled eggs and toast. He ate it without noticing the flavor, then looked at his watch. 7:01. “Shit!” he swore, and then ran for the bridge. 7:05. He stopped, with his limbs splaying out a little, at Katie’s seat. She pointedly looked at her watch.   
“I’m sorry, Commander. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep last night.”   
“Lucas, this is the military, no one gives a damn about your excuses. Don’t let it happen again.”   
“Yes, commander, I’m sorry.” He said again.   
“Never mind. We seem to have a virus that is evading our virus scan software. We don’t know what it’s doing but we need it eliminated. It’s causing popup ads on all of our consoles and if there were an emergency we could be delayed by stupid popup ads,” she told him.   
“No problem, I’ll get right on it.” Lucas “uh, where do I work?” he said, pausing temporarily.   
“In your room, like you always have, Lucas,” she gave him that smile that had won hearts at WestRidge farming community.


	2. Back Alley

Ben Krieg wore jeans and a button down t-shirt when he slid around the corner into the back alley. There were some things he knew because of parts of his job that he found less pleasant than others. This was one of them, although this was not business. When supply chains broke down in the UEO for certain things, he knew how to get them. He just didn’t necessarily like the people he had to deal with to do it. A dark figure in black sweat suit and hoody approached him from behind.   
“How do you like that new-fangled gadget?” the stranger asked.   
“Better than the old-fangled gadget,” he replied evenly.   
“What is the UEO doing with what I sell?” the man asked.   
“The UEO can’t find out about this. This is strictly personal,” Ben answered, getting a little nervous.   
The man handed him a cooler, and he handed the man an envelope of cash. The man quickly opened it and counted it. “Thank you very much,” he said, when he was satisfied that it was the agreed upon amount.   
“Thank you,” Ben answered, then walked away. He finally had it. One completely illegal, delicious, nutritious hamburger.


	3. Sunrise

There was one thing that Kristin Westphalen missed more than anything else living on a submarine. That was the sunrise. The bright reds and purples coming over the ocean from her home in England were incredible. When she was a girl, she saw them every day while she waited for the school bus in the morning. As a young woman and college student she had gotten up early nearly every day just to watch the sunrise. Now she almost never got to see either the sunrise or the sunset. She and Nathan stood on the dock at Pearl Harbor. He had taken her out early, just for this. She watched as the sky performed its delicate dance, coloring the clouds beautiful red and purple shades. As the colors faded to blue, she leaned over and towards him.   
“May I kiss you, Doctor?” he asked.   
“Always,” she answered, moving her arms to embrace him.   
He held her close, and they closed their eyes and brought their lips together. The moment was magical. She almost wished she wasn’t going to leave the seaQuest for England the next day, but then she remembered that she had a practice and a life to build on land. She held him closer, momentarily, then let go. He let go too. “We have a full day ahead of us. Let’s not ruin it by thinking about what come next,” he said  
“Good plan. What are we doing next?” she asked.


	4. Late

Miguel was late for his check-in. He had promised to check in with the seaQuest every 12 hours while he was in Cuban territory. They were unaligned with the UEO, and being caught there as a UEO service member could get you killed. Still, his father had died, and he needed to go home to deal with all the technicalities that involved, and see his sister and brothers. Cuba was still a socialist government, and the Obama administration’s loosening of rules regarding American trade and travel to the country had helped them, but not much. Everyone was still desperately poor. Still, there would be sentimental items which Miguel and his family would bicker over.   
“Mister O’Neil,” Captain Bridger interrupted the silence. “Organize a team to find Mr Ortiz, please.”   
“Yes, sir.” He began calling Crocker’s security people. 

When he had a team together, they boarded a shuttle and went into Cuban territory. The seaQuest would have to hide because being caught there could be seen as an act of war, but they could be back in American waters in moments. It was only 90 miles from Havana to Pearl Harbor. The away team landed in Havana, and started tracking Miguel’s movements through a GPS placed into his communicator. He was close, assuming he was still with his communicator.   
They closed in on the house, and knocked on the door. A latina woman answered the door. Tim asked her if Miguel were there.   
“No, and thank God you came. They came for him at the funeral. The police, they took my brother away.”   
Tim felt as though he’d been sucker punched in the gut.   
“Can we come in?” he asked her.   
“I think it’s best if we’re not associated with the UEO anymore than we already are,” she said closing the door in his face. 

Tim looked at Crocker. “What do we do?”   
“We go to the police station and see if we can find Miguel,” Crocker answered.   
Tim nodded. They moved double time towards the police station. Much to their surprise, they found Miguel immediately. He was being held in a cell with a window, and he could see and speak to them through the open air room.   
“There’s only two policemen here,” Miguel told them. “You can easily overpower them.”   
“Great,” Tim said, moving with his six men towards the entrance.   
He walked in the door, and shot the first guard with his stun gun in one movement. Then he ransacked the unconscious body for keys before leaving him handcuffed to the desk. Finding the keys, he ran through the jail, unlocking every cell so that it wouldn’t be obvious they had come in for Miguel. When he had freed the 10 prisoners, including Miguel, they all ran out the door and back to the launch.


	5. Son

Nathan walked into the church and stared at the crucifix at the front of the room. It was too much. It was too much to ask that he find his old faith. God had stolen Robert much too young, and then to top it off, He had stolen his wife, and only comfort. He looked at Jesus on the cross. “What did I do wrong?” he asked aloud. He received no answer. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said.   
“It’s not about what you did wrong,” came a voice from the back of the room.   
Nathan startled and spun around.   
“Father, you scared me,” he said, recatching his breath.   
“I’m sorry. I did not mean to,” the father answered, “I just heard that perhaps you were in distress and I have come to listen.”   
“I don’t really think a confession is what I need right now,” Nathan answered.   
“I didn’t have a confession in mind. Just a listening ear.”   
“I just, I lost my wife and my son,” Nathan told him. “I have the opportunity to start over again, with a job I ran away from when my son died, and many of the people I love and care about most. But I promised my wife I was done with the navy when my son died.”  
“The navy is a tough job. But if that’s where the people you love are left, it sounds like it may be your best hope for recovery,” the priest told him.   
“Thank you father,” Nathan said, suddenly, standing up and walking out of the church and back to the seaQuest.


	6. Hot

Katherine Hitchcock was drenched in sweat. She had taken off her UEO uniform and was wearing an undershirt and shorts while she struggled with the very heavy pipes that were supposed to be sending cool air through the third deck. This was the second time this year the damned thing had broken. Crocker’s security personnel were helping lift the pipes, and they all grunted under the effort. One of them wiped sweat off his face onto his uniform. “The coupling is on the fritz” she said, finally, pulling the tiny chip out of the wall. “Get Ben, and ask him for a replacement. It’s a 25 cent part. Certainly we have them?”  
One of the men paged Ben, who came running down in full military uniform with the part. “Hot down here,” he commented.   
“Really, Ben? I had no idea.” Katie looked at him, then looked at herself. She was basically wearing her underwear, and although Ben had seen her in a lot less, that was a different life now. He was staring at her.   
“Ben, get out of here,” she snapped.   
“Right, oh, sorry. I was just. I mean, here’s the part you wanted. Sorry. I’m gone,” and with that he turned around and ran back to the cooler decks above deck 3.


	7. Friend

“Permission to speak freely, sir?” Crocker asked.   
“Of course,” Nathan responded without even thinking about it.   
“I know you love Lucas, hell we all do, but you more than most. But you can’t let yourself get too wrapped up in his decisions. He’s a 16 year old, not a tiny child. He’s going to make bad decisions from time to time, and it has nothing to do with you.”  
“Oh I know. But it frustrates me when someone so smart is so damned stupid,” Nathan replied. “Sometimes he seems like another adult when he’s the only one who can solve something, like that virus Stark left. Then sometimes…” he trailed off and gestured helplessly at the wrecked Stinger.   
“Don’t go too hard on him, Cap. I think the broken arm will be a better lesson than any you could hope to impart.”   
“Hotdogging I expect. A little recklessness I expect. Hotdogging drunk though? There has to be some kind of consequence beyond the broken arm. At the very least, he can’t use the Stinger anymore.” Nathan felt himself starting to get into a rant, and stopped.   
“I think that’s reasonable. But Cap, remember back to our own academy days when we stole the army’s tanks and drove those drunk down the mountain.”   
Nathan winced. It hadn’t been his proudest moment, but fortunately, it’s hard to get hurt in a tank.   
“Alright, Crocker, your point has been made. Let me go talk to Lucas. I’m sure he could use a more friendly face than Kristin right now.” He smiled a little bit, remembering, and then put his stern face back on and walked down to medbay. Before he left, he turned around and took one good look at Crocker. It was good to have a friend aboard.


	8. Floor

Lucas stood up from the bed he was in in medbay. Then he hit the floor. “Ugh,” he muttered, putting his hands on the floor and attempting to stand up. He got himself situated, holding onto the bed. Then he attempted to stand again, and hit the floor. “Doc, what’s wrong with me?” he asked.   
“You’re drunk. You’re too drunk to drive, and yet you were driving, and you’re lucky the seaQuest heard your emergency beacon before the police did or else you’d be sitting in jail right now nursing a hangover.   
“Oh man, I wrecked the Stinger?”   
You did, and I’d be shocked if Nathan ever let you drive it again anyway.”   
“I probably deserve that,” Lucas said aloud while thinking “now I’m stuck on this submarine and can’t even have a social life?”   
“You absolutely deserve that,” Kristin told him. “I wouldn’t even feel bad for you if you were in that jail cell.”   
“You’d feel a little bad,” Lucas argued.   
“Maybe a little, Lucas, but what you did? You’re supposed to be smart. This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen you do. It was irresponsible. You could have gotten killed. You could have killed someone else. A child even. Then what? Then there’s nothing anyone could have done to keep you out of prison on manslaughter charges. Lucas, you…” she stopped as Nathan walked in the door.


	9. cheat

“It wasn’t going to happen Ben. You cheated on me.” Katie spat at him.   
“Only once, and it was an accident.” He tried to defend himself.   
“Oh you accidentally put your dick in another girl’s mouth?” she asked.   
“We were drunk. We were all drunk. Katie you know that.”   
“Drunk isn’t an excuse, Ben. Millions, billions of people get drunk every weekend and don’t cheat.”  
“I didn’t think that…”  
“Exactly you didn’t think.” She cut him off.   
“Katie,” he tried.   
“Don’t Katie me, Ben. You screwed up, and your actions have consequences.” She turned to walk away from him. He started to follow her, but decided against it at the last minute, and turned back to his computer. It had been the worst mistake of his life. He couldn’t live with himself having hurt her like that, but for her to not even let him close to her afterwards stung. He had thought they were forever, an unshakeable match. He had shaken things, and they had broken. Now he wanted only to fix his mistake, but he was not going to be given that opportunity.   
Lucas joined him at the computer. “Hey Ben, any idea why Commander Hitchcock looks so upset?”   
“Does she?” he asked, almost hopefully.   
“She does,” Lucas confirmed.   
“It’s a long story. I screwed up, years ago, and she won’t let me forget it,” Ben said shaking his head.


	10. Think

“Shouldn’t try to be a straight A student, if you are then you think too much,” Ben sang and danced to Billy Joel as he walked from MedBay to the bridge. Lucas caught up with him. “Just because you couldn’t be a straight A student doesn’t mean you should knock those of us who were,” he teased.   
“Oh Lucas, you don’t know the classics,” Ben complained.   
“Billy Joel? What has he done since 1985?”   
“That’s not the point, Lucas. He’s one of the greats.”   
“He’s older than my father. He’s older than your father, and he’s married to a girl your age,” Lucas pointed out.   
“That’s not the point.”   
“But it is. That’s gross, and I don’t want to financially support it,” Lucas said.   
“Your loss,” Ben said. “You’re welcome to come with Tim and me when we go see him in Pearl Harbor next weekend.”   
“No thanks,” Lucas said, turning away humming “sing us a song you’re the piano man,” then yelling “damnit!”   
“Got you, did it?” Ben asked, turning around.   
“Ugh, yeah,” Lucas groaned.   
“He’s a classic,” Ben said, “you sure you won’t come with?”   
“No, I really don’t want to go, but thanks Ben. I mean it.”


	11. Disgust

Sometimes it wasn’t worth living on a submarine where there were only communal bathrooms and no privacy at all, Lucas thought with disgust as he ran for the bathroom puking as he went. He looked with disgust as the vomit fell through the floor into the duct work. “I hope that eventually gets cleaned,” he thought before losing all his thoughts as he emptied his stomach into the toilet. He sat back on his knees, and just sat there for a few minutes, trying to judge whether he was going to need the toilet again.   
“You alright, Lucas?” Ben asked, following him into the bathroom.   
“I think so. Just not feeling too hot right now,” Lucas told him, flushing the toilet.   
“I see that. You drunk?” Ben asked.   
“No,” Lucas shot defensively, “Bridger won’t let me touch that stuff, and I haven’t been off the seaQuest since I wrecked the Stinger.”   
“Just had to ask,” Ben said. “Time to head to MedBay. Kristin will want to see you.”   
“It’s just a flu,” Lucas protested.   
“Just a flu can be a big deal on a submarine, though. You can get everyone sick if you don’t go into quarantine.”   
Lucas groaned  
“Come on, let’s go see the doctor,” Ben took him by the arm, and helped him off the floor.


	12. Shelter

Lights flashed red and sirens sounded. “Red alert, red alert, all hands man battle stations” was being announced over the loudspeaker by a disembodied voice. Lucas stared at Darwin for a moment and then joined the stampede in the hallway. He knew his assignment during a red alert was to go to his own room and close and lock the door. Unfortunately, all of the seaQuest crew members were running the opposite direction of where he needed to go through the hallways. He ducked back into the moon pool.   
“Lucas scared,” Darwin chirped.   
“Yeah, Darwin, Lucas scared.” Lucas said. Water splashed over the edge of the pool. Lucas closed it so the lid came on top of it. The boots slowed outside of the moon pool. Lucas ran towards his room. The boat lurched to the left, and he stumbled, falling, and twisting his knee. He tried to stand up, but collapsed again, yelling, “aw, fuck. Ow!” There would be no one nearby if he yelled. He had to get to MedBay, or to a communicator to call the doctor. He stood on his right leg, hopping on one foot until he reached the moon pool again. “Darwin. Get the doctor.” He said into the vocorder. Darwin nodded, and swam off in the direction of the doctor’s MedBay.   
“Lucas hurt,” he said to Kristin.   
“What? Darwin, where?”   
Darwin nodded and started swimming towards Lucas. Kristin followed behind him at a jog.


	13. Borrow

“Do you have any G rated films?” Lucas asked Ben.   
“This is a sub-mar-ine. Can you say that? Submarine?” Ben asked back.   
“I know, but Chloe is coming, and I want to show her something risk free, after all the trauma she’s endured, I want something classic,” Lucas explained.   
“Well I have a collection of movies about the ocean,” Ben finally admitted. “Moana might be in there.”   
“That would be perfect, Ben, thanks!”   
Ben pulled it out of the closet, and had Lucas sign all the requisite paperwork to borrow something from the ship’s library. Lucas thanked Ben, and then made his way back to his own room. He watched the DVD extras while he waited for word that his friend had come aboard. When Nathan called him, he ran towards sea deck as quickly as the MagLev would take him. “Chloe!” he yelled, and hugged her.   
“Hi,” she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes, and then returning the embrace.   
“What do you kids have planned?” Bridger asked.   
“A Movie in my room, then dinner in the crew mess, and a meeting with Darwin.”   
“Sounds good, behave.” Nathan said smiling.   
“Of course, Cap.” Lucas said taking Chloe’s hand and walking with her back to his room, taking the long way around so they could talk.


	14. Chair

Tim almost fell out of his chair. The strike to the seaQuest was a severe one, and it would take time to repair it, it was clear. He spoke in Spanish as rapidly as he could, trying to convince the enemy sub that they didn’t want to pick a fight with someone twice their own size. He frowned as the Cuban sub did not respond to any of his commands. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m just not getting anything,” he said to Captain Bridger.   
“Target them, Mister Ortiz,” Bridger said. “Then try one more time, Mr O’Neil.”   
“Aye sir,” they both said, and Ortiz began a targeting sweep. Tim spoke in Spanish one more time, but there was no response.   
“Sir, they are targeting us again,” Ortiz announced.   
“Target their propulsion system. Take them down,” Bridger responded, “and countermeasures away.”   
“Countermeasures away,” Ortiz responded. “Firing torpedoes.” He pushed a few buttons and the torpedoes left the ship aimed at the enemy propulsion system.   
“They’re down, sir,” he announced.   
“Get me a team that speaks Spanish and go find out what is wrong with that ship, and why they’re firing on us. Treat them as hostile, and bring them back. I’ll have Crocker ready a team at the brig.”   
Ortiz and O’Neil joined four others in a boarding party. As they boarded the boat, they yelled out for anyone to surrender. To their surprise, the entire crew surrendered. The captain claimed his ship had been hacked, and they hadn’t been able to respond to hails or stop from attacking. The seaQuest would have to find the hacker. Tim knew just the person for that job.


	15. Altar

Chief Shan sat with a chalice in his hands, and a little bit of salt sitting on a night stand. It was difficult to have an altar on a submarine. For one thing, he didn’t want anyone else to guess what it was, and for another, occasionally the boat shook which would scatter the salt, or knock over the chalice. He wasn’t allowed to have a knife large enough to qualify as an athame, and nor was he allowed any candles, although he had two fake ones that lit little bulbs. He frowned. He had known he would give up his altar to go to boot camp, but he hadn’t realized he would not have it for the rest of his career. He sighed, then spilt a little bit of salt between the two “candles” and put his chalice of water behind it. That would have to do, he thought. It was a full moon, so time for a ritual. He cleansed himself, and sat before the altar, and meditated on the glow of the fake candles. He couldn’t even see the moon from underwater, which upset him more than he expected it to. Still, it would have to do. He couldn’t expect shore leave every month.


	16. Peace

“I signed up for a peace keeping mission, not a war mission,” Nathan Bridger said aloud to a hologram of his old Academy professor.   
“You signed up for a military submarine with a peacekeeping mission,” the hologram replied. “You’ve been in the Navy long enough to know that peace keeping often is a code word for war.”   
“Bill told me it was different now,” Nathan objected, though he knew that he was defeated. They had been calling military movements “peacekeeping” missions since Vietnam. It was a way to sell war to a populace which was tired of war after 200 years of perpetual warfare. True, it was finally peace time; the first peace time in America’s history. Yet, there were pirates and apparently pissed off former captains to contend with. The remnants of ISIS sometimes attacked various subs and undersea colonies. The next war would probably be with ISIS, he thought, annoyed. Peace could never last for long when you were the superpower.   
“Is it not different now?” the hologram asked, “you have your science contingent, and they outnumber the military personnel aboard this vessel.”   
“It is different, I guess. I only hope we can stick to their mission more often than the military one from now on,” Nathan mused.   
“I think that is why the admiral was so happy to see you aboard,” the professor replied.   
“Yes, I suppose it is. Thank you. You’ve been very helpful,” Nathan said, switching the program off and sitting back on his bed.


	17. Beach

The crew of the seaQuest sat on the beach at Pearl Harbor. It was rare to have time off at a time when there wasn’t really enough time to go home, but there was plenty of time to watch some dolphins play in the surf, or take a dip in the ocean. Lucas and Ben were about waist deep in the water, jumping as waves came up to them, and squatting most of the time. The waves were large; it was nearly high tide. It was just a refueling stop, but it felt great to breathe the natural air, and watch the sunset together. A few people had run into town to find a beer or three, but the majority of the crew was on the white sandy beaches of the newest beach city in the country. Even Darwin was off for the time being. He swam up next to Lucas and Ben and chattered happily. Lucas laughed, “hey Darwin,” he said, petting the dolphin’s melon, and eliciting more happy chatter from the mammal. Darwin ducked his head under the water, and came up with a fish. Lucas laughed. “Gotta eat, huh, Darwin?” he asked. The dolphin nodded, or maybe he was just swallowing his fish.


	18. True

“Darwin good hunter,” the dolphin chirped.   
“Yes, I’m sure that’s true, Darwin,” Lucas answered, “but right now we have to work on your vocabulary,”   
“Darwin hunt fish,” Darwin tried again.   
“Fine, let me ask the Captain if we are high enough in the water, and staying still enough for you to go out and hunt,” Lucas spoke into the yellow vocorder. Then he reached for one of the ship’s communicators. “Lucas to Captain,” he asked.   
“Lucas, what is it? I’ve just gone to bed,” came the reply.   
“Sorry, sir, I’ll ask commander Ford,” Lucas said trying again, “Lucas to Commander Ford?”   
“Ford here,” came the immediate answer.   
“Commander, Darwin is insisting on going outside to hunt. Can I send him out?”   
“Yes, I’ll open the sea doors for him now,” the commander answered, and the door to the moon pool began to shut. Darwin swam off. An hour later he returned with a still-living octopus. He brought it into the moon pool, and let it go, chasing it as it tried to swim away from him. He caught it, then let it go again.   
“Darwin, don’t play with your food,” Lucas admonished.   
“Darwin hunt,” the dolphin said prodding the octopus with his rostrum  
“Are you hunting for food, or because you want to hunt?” Lucas asked him as the octopus swam away as quickly as it could.   
“Darwin hunt,” the dolphin said again, chasing after the octopus. This time, he finally ate it.


	19. Crazy

“Tim, if you’d told me three years ago I’d be subservient to a walking, talking cheeto, I’d have called you crazy,” Miguel said.   
“Me too, honestly, but being a part of the UEO shields us from the worst of it,” Tim answered.   
“I just don’t know. The Muslim bans, the banning of global warming research… it’s ridiculous. How anyone can continue denying global warming after all the research we’ve done is beyond the pale.”   
“He quietly kicked a bunch of Muslims out of the military, too. Happened to a couple kids I was friends with on the Clinton. They wanted to re-up, but were told no, with no reason given. It was the same time I re-upped, no problems.” Tim added.   
“I knew a couple Muslims who were kicked out, too, on minor disciplinary matters that should have gotten them no more than a write-up,” Miguel said.   
“Hopefully the UEO protects those who are left,” Tim looked doubtful.   
“Hopefully, but this is what I’m talking about. I’m not sure I can support this anymore. I’m not sure I want to be a part of it,” Miguel said.  
“What are your other options?” Tim asked.   
“I don’t know. I’m a sailor. I’ve always wanted to be a sailor. I still want to be a sailor.” Miguel sighed, “there aren’t really other professions where one can be a sailor.”   
“No, there’s not. Look, it’s only 2 more years, and then we’ll elect someone better. Stick with us. Stick with Captain Bridger. He pretty much does his own thing anyway and I’m sure he won’t let any harm come to anyone under his command if there is absolutely anything he can do about it.”


	20. Love

“Truth or Dare?” Ben asked Katie.   
“Truth,” she answered confidently.   
“OK, who was your first celebrity crush?” Ben asked, laughing.   
“Joey McIntyre,” Katie said, laughing.   
“Oh, no way, the New Kids?” Ben laughed, and Tim and Miguel joined in.   
“The who?” Lucas asked.   
“Kids!” Ben sputtered out laughing.   
“A boy band called New Kids On the Block,” Tim explained. “They were popular in the early 90s.”   
“They still tour,” Miguel chimed in, “but I don’t think anyone under 30 has ever been to one of their shows.”   
“I went to see them when I was 7,” Katie told them, “but no way I’d pay to go now.”   
“You know who did improve from their younger days, though,” Miguel chimed in.   
“Who’s that?” Tim asked.   
“Hanson,”   
“Like ‘mmbop?” Katie asked.   
“Yeah, some of their adult music is actually really good. Here I’ll show you.” Miguel said fidgeting with his iPod. Music came out of it shortly afterwards. They all listened, and finally Lucas said, “this is really good,”   
“Yeah,” everyone agreed. “Why don’t we hear this on the radio?”   
“I heard it on NPR.” Miguel said, “they interviewed the boys about their transitions in their careers.”   
“Alright, Tim, Truth or Dare?” Katie asked.


	21. New

“What’s in the boxes, Ben?” Lucas asked.   
“New iPads for everyone aboard seaQuest.”   
“Will they connect with the cell signal?” Lucas asked again.   
“Only when you’re on shore, but they’ll all connect to the wifi on the ship,” Ben answered   
“So do I get one?”   
“Yes, come by my room in about an hour and I’ll start handing them out,” Ben told him, and then continued walking away.   
An hour later Lucas started a queue outside Ben’s door. Three or four people were ahead of him, but he was one of the first to walk away with a brand new iPad. He went back to his room and set it up. It started by asking to connect to the wifi and then asked for Lucas’ apple id. Lucas tried a few different passwords and failed each time. On his third try it locked him out and demanded he change his password. He typed a new combination of words into the bar and was told “new password cannot be old password”   
“Fuckit!” Lucas yelled pounding the wall. He tried three more times, getting the same error each time, until on the fourth try, he got a new password. He immediately wrote it down, and moments later his phone chimed, demanding the new password. He plugged it in and then went back to setting up the iPad. He downloaded the InterNex app and looked for Wolfman.   
“What are you going to do with it?” Wolfman asked.   
“My job, mostly, and stream TV.”   
“I’ve got a few apps I can recommend.” Wolfman suggestsd.   
“Great. Like what?”   
Wolfman suggested a few games to play on the iPad, and then asked, “do you want a good podcast app or you good with the default?”   
“I’ll probably continue listening to podcasts on my phone, honestly,” Lucas answered while downloading the games Nick suggested.   
When he had the iPad exactly as he wanted it, he finally went to bed.


	22. Beggar

Lucas returned from scuba diving in the Philippines. “Ben! Can you get me a new cell phone? Mine got stolen on the beach!” he spat.   
“Can’t you trace it?”   
“I can, and I did. I got to someone’s house, but the police refused to do anything about it.”   
“Well that’s crap,” Ben said, “but here, we have one iPhone 8 left.”   
“Ugh. Do we have anything with a headphone jack available?” Lucas moaned.   
“Nope. Beggars can’t be choosers, Lucas.”   
“Fine. Thanks.”   
“If it helps, I think it comes with a headphone add on in the box,” Ben called after him.   
“I will lose that in a heartbeat,” Lucas muttered, walking away to set up the new phone. He quickly realized the flaw in his plan. He didn’t know how to get the phone on his phone plan until the next time he was in The United States. “Captain?” he called on his communicator.   
“Yes Lucas?”   
“When will we be in the US again?” he asked.   
“Probably in about a month, we’ll have a day in Los Angeles,” the Captain told him.   
A month sounded like a long time to go without a phone, but Lucas realized he’d probably be under water and unable to use his phone for most of it anyway. He sighed and stared at the new phone. He could at least put it on the wifi and use Skype with it. He could probably recreate his apps from his old phone, too, and play games on the wifi. He logged into his apple id, and found that most of that stuff had been saved for him. “Well, at least that’s good,” he muttered, and downloaded everything all at once. He found the piece that connected the headphone jack to the charging port on the phone, and put it in his desk drawer. “Hope I can find that again,” he said to himself, before plugging the phone in to charge, and going to bed.


	23. False

“Lucas got totally drunk and danced on the table at the Christmas party!” Ben announced to anyone who would listen. Of course, most of the crew had been there, but this time Ben was talking to Juliana and Nick.   
“That is totally false!” Lucas protested.   
“I have the pictures!” Ben told him, pulling out his phone.   
Lucas jumped at him, “Ben put that away!”   
“I just think your friends ought to see your Christmas pictures,” Ben said pulling them up, and showing Juliana. She and Nick laughed  
“You’re lucky they let you drink around here. Node 3 doesn’t allow alcohol even for the people who are over 21.”   
“Let might be pushing it.” Lucas said. “Ben spiked the punch without telling anyone.”   
“This is a submarine!” Ben laughed.   
“People have a right to know if they are drinking,” Lucas protested, “what if there were someone who was 12 stepping it?”   
Ben looked a little subdued. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted.   
“Of course you didn’t. Just like you didn’t think that there was someone who is only 16 aboard,” Captain Bridger told him, approaching from behind. Ben’s mood was immediately subdued. “Yes sir, sorry sir” he said immediately.   
“I think a fitting consequence is that you have to clean the puke out of the grates between the mess hall and Lucas’ room,” Bridger said.   
Ben turned green.   
“There are paper towels in the mess closet, and a mop and bucket in the bathroom closet,” Bridger told him.   
“Yes sir,” Ben said turning around.


	24. Happy

“Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof,” Lucas sang cheerfully. Tim looked at him, then laughed and clapped. “Hey thanks Tim!” Lucas interrupted his song to say. “Clap along if you know that happiness is the truth,” Tim sang with him. They walked down the hall singing and clapping.   
“What’s the occasion?” Ben asked.   
“We’re happy!” they both sang.   
“I’m always down for a celebration. What are we celebrating?”   
“It’s my birthday!” Lucas enthused.   
“Hey! Happy Birthday, Lucas!” Ben and Tim both said.   
“Thanks guys!” Lucas said, continuing down the hallway singing “Because I’m happy!”   
He got back to his room and logged on to Facebook. He had “Happy Birthday” messages from most of his friends, and much of the seaQuest crew. He smiled and liked each message, replying back to those who asked him questions or made more personal comments. “100 birthday wishes, I’m a lucky guy” he posted on his own wall, which immediately started getting more likes and happy birthday messages posted to it. He vaguely wondered whether dolphins had any concept of birthdays, so he called Darwin on the vocorder. “Darwin, do dolphins have birthdays?” he asked.   
“What is birthday?” Darwin asked.   
“Like, the day you were born. Do you celebrate it every year?” Darwin looked at him curiously.   
“Do you know how old you are Darwin?” Lucas asked.   
“Darwin is not old. Darwin is new” came the answer. Lucas laughed. “I guess not,” he said “We should give you a birthday.”   
“Darwin’s birthday?” he asked.   
“We can celebrate your birthday every year. I’ll ask Captain Bridger when he found you, and then that will be your birthday,” Lucas called up to the captain, who could only remember that it was sometime in April. “April fools it is, then” Lucas said laughing. “That’s your birthday, Darwin, April 1st”


	25. Cancer

“Is this a liver?” Lucas asked Kristin, poking at a liver in a petri dish.   
“Yes, it’s a shark’s liver,” Kristin answered him. “Sharks don’t get cancer, so we hope by studying their DNA we can find a cure for cancer in humans. And don’t touch that. You’ll contaminate it.”   
“Sorry,” he said, removing his finger from the liver. He continued peering at it. Doctor Westphalen grabbed it, and started chopping it up to extract the DNA. Then she took a lump of something and told Lucas, “this is liver cancer. We’re trying to find out why our shark friend over here can’t get it. So we’ll expose it to the shark’s DNA and see if it shrinks.”   
“I think I prefer living animals,” Lucas said with a blanched look on his face.   
“Yes, yes, go to your dolphin,” Kristin laughed.   
Lucas walked the ten feet between Kristin’s station, and the nearest open water aboard the sub. “Darwin?” he called.   
“Lucas Play,” came the answer.   
“Yes, Lucas play.” Lucas got in the water with Darwin and brought a basketball, attaching a basketball net to the edge of the pool. They splashed and played basketball until Kristin called him again. “Lucas, come look at this.” He got out of the water and headed over to the microscope. “It looks like you chopped the cancer up,” he said.   
“Yes, but I didn’t. The shark’s liver did that.”   
“Doc, are you saying you’ve come up with a cure to cancer?”   
“I wouldn’t go that far this quickly, but, it looks promising.


	26. Pickpocket

“Damnit” Miguel swore.   
“What’s the matter?” Tim asked him.   
“I can’t find my phone. Can you call me?” Miguel asked him. Tim picked up his phone and dialed Miguel. It didn’t ring. It finally went to voice mail.   
“When’s the last time you know you had it?” Tim asked him.   
“At the Starbucks. I definitely had it when I used it to pay for my coffee,” Miguel thought about it. I haven’t seen it since then.   
“Let’s see if the GPS is working on it then, maybe it’s still at Starbucks.” Tim opened his laptop. Miguel entered his password, and the phone showed up on the map. It was at a private residence in the middle of Pearl Harbor. “We didn’t go anywhere near there,” Tim said.   
“No, I guess I should call the cops,” Miguel answered.   
“Yes, and remotely wipe your phone before they get any personal data off it.” Tim reminded him.   
Miguel pressed a button on the computer, and called 911. He told them he had tracked his phone, and it had been stolen. The police asked if he wanted to give a statement, but admitted there wasn’t much they could do since they wouldn’t bother getting a warrant for anything as small as a phone. He hung up, and swore again.


	27. Reverse

“Full reverse!” Captain Bridger ordered sharply.   
“Full reverse, aye,” came the answer immediately, and the helmsman pulled back on the steering wheel as hard as he could. The ship jerked to a stop, but not quickly enough to avoid a column of fresh water in the Bermuda Triangle.   
“Way heavy.” Announced the helmsman.   
“Ballasts away,” Bridger commanded. It was done immediately and gave them just enough of a bounce to escape the fresh water. They escaped backwards.   
“Call Commander Ford. Tell him to remain still and we’ll come to him,” Bridger ordered Tim O’Neil. Tim dialed the commander’s shuttle but received no response. “I can’t reach the commander, sir,” he informed Nathan.   
“Damn,” Bridger swore, and ordered Miguel to find the commander with the WSKRS.   
“The commander is still on shore,” Miguel announced, finally, and the entire room let out its collective breath.   
Minutes later, Miguel announced, “The commander’s shuttle is wet, sir,” and Bridger again ordered O’Neil to tell him they’d come to him not the other way around. Before he could, he was getting a distress call from the commander, “Mayday, mayday, this is MR4”   
“Get to him,” Bridger commanded, and the helmsman steered around the freshwater until they reached the commander. They couldn’t reach him because he was in a column of fresh water. But, they sent a magnet to grab him and bring him back.


	28. Deliver

Deliver OLA-5 modules to nexus, pick up then deliver MI-6 modules to sea cove. Pick up then deliver RS-2 modules to somewhere else. You’d think the UEO had forgotten that air travel is still faster than submarine travel, even aboard the seaQuest. And how am I supposed to allow my scientists any access to a single location to do research for any amount of time when the UEO is using me as a courier service? I mean, I know the science contingent is supposed to know that we may pick up and move at any moment, but all this movement for nothing is stupid. Put these stupid things aboard an airplane and then a mail delivery ship when they get close to where they are going. I don’t have time for all this nonsense. I want to study my rhubarb, and find out if we’ve successfully made a version that can survive the low light conditions of a colony. I want to count dolphins in a specific geographic area to find out how their health is doing. I do not want to be the post office for the UEO. This submarine is too fantastic to waste our potential playing mail man for Noyce.


	29. Arrival

Lucas stood in the entrance way to his new home aboard the seaQuest DSV. People ran this way and that not really paying attention to him. Occasionally he got a strange look, but no one stopped to help him. Everyone around him was wearing either the black wetsuit that made up a submariner’s uniform, or the blue khaki uniform that identified the science crew. He alone wore a Marlin’s jersey and blue jeans. He looked around nervously. Finally, he caught the attention of a tall African American man in military uniform. “I’m commander Ford. You must be Lucas Wolenczack.”   
“Yes,” Lucas said, breathing a sigh of relief.   
“Your room is in mammal engineering, just follow the signs. All your things have already been put in your room for you,” he told him.   
“Great, thanks,” Lucas said, looking around for a sign. He found one that led to MagLev, and took that to the engineering department. He stepped off the MagLev, and found a sign directing him to his rom. He started walking. It was a bit of a hike, but he eventually found his room. He pushed open the door. There were pipes overhead, painted bright yellow. He could probably hit his had on them pretty easily if he weren’t careful. He threw his carry on onto the bed, and sat down. His computer was in boxes around the room along with his clothing and the vocorder project he was working on. He hadn’t thought to label everything before he packed it, so it was a crap-shoot what was where. He opened a box. It was a box of clothes, so he tossed it aside. He opened a few more boxes. He found the yellow vocorder speakers, and the monitor for his computer. He looked around. He had promised to send an email to his parents as soon as he could so they would know he arrived safely. They probably wouldn’t notice the lack of an email, but he wanted to send it anyway.   
Finally, a knock came on the door. “These got sent to engineering instead of mammal engineering” the officer said, handing him three more boxes. He opened them, and finally, there was his computer. He plugged it in and logged onto the wifi. He sent out an email to his parents and a few friends, and then logged off and took the vocorder tot he moon pool, which he had seen on his trip in. He plugged the vocorder in and then drummed on the side wall of the moon pool looking for a dolphin. Finally, Dr Westphalen came in, “there’s no dolphin yet. The military has not thought to inform me of why,” she said.   
“But all my research is with dolphins,” Lucas protested, as he hung up the speaker device.   
“The military claims there will be a dolphin. There just isn’t yet. I don’t know why,” she repeated. Lucas shrugged his shoulders and went back to his room to log onto the InterNex. He stayed there a few hours until his next task was to find food. He made his way back to the MagLev, where he saw a sign for the mess hall. He made his way there, and got a hamburger and fries before finding a table by himself. He watched people come and go as he ate, but no one paid attention to the kid in the corner.


	30. Fall

It is October 31st, Halloween. Lucas looked around. Everyone around him was in uniform. Even Ben Krieg, who could usually be counted upon for a laugh, was wearing his uniform. He sighed. Sure, Halloween was largely for children, but, well, he was still a child, wasn’t he? Maybe, if he were still at home, he’d find a small child to take trick or treating, and collect candy, too. His friends were planning Trick Or Treat escapades. He was jealous. Maybe if people at least dressed up here he’d feel better. But no. He tracked down Ben and asked him if he had any slasher flicks he could borrow.   
“Sorry, really only family films,” Ben admitted. “But I hear they’re playing Scream in the community theater tonight,” he added, seeing Lucas’ face fall.   
“Like, older than me, Scream?” Lucas asked.   
“Geeze you’re young,” Ben answered.   
“I’m 16,” Lucas defended himself.   
“I’m twice your age,” Ben answered.   
“Geeze you’re old,” Lucas retorted.   
“Work now, boys,” Katie interjected. Both men looked down momentarily, and then got back to work. 

At dinner, Lucas found cupcakes with orange frosting. At least someone was making some effort to celebrate the holiday, even if there were no costumes. He helped himself to two of them, and ate them before his pizza, getting orange frosting on his nose. “You like Halloween, eh?” Tim asked him.   
“Love it.” He answered.   
“Are you going to come watch Scream with us tonight?”   
“I think so,” Lucas answered. 

After dinner, Lucas decided to go downstairs and watch Scream, despite it being older than he was. It wasn’t the scary movie he wanted; in fact he laughed through most of it. Nonetheless, it was better than nothing.


	31. Knife

Lucas and Ben fenced with their knives in the mess hall. Lucas bent his wrist, announcing, as his knife touched Ben’s uniform sleeve, “I got you!”   
“I’ll get you for that!” Ben retorted and touched Lucas on the back of the hand with his knife. They both laughed. They continued their sword fighting until Tim came up behind them, and got poked with a knife. The sword fighters looked at each other. Tim stared at the knife for a moment too long, then took out his own knife and stabbed Ben with it. Lucas breathed a sigh of relief, and the knives clicked against each other for another several minutes until Katie came in. “Boys,” she said with a warning tone in her voice. All of them put their knives down. They were having fake steak. Ben poked at his with his knife.   
“What’s wrong Ben?” Lucas asked.   
“It’s fake,” he answered.   
“That way it’s not a cow,” Lucas said, cutting into his.   
“Cows are tasty,” Ben replied, cutting into his, too, and then stabbing it with a fork. Lucas made a face. “Have you ever even had real ice cream?” he asked.   
“The soy stuff is tasty,” Lucas replied.   
“Not the way real ice cream was, though,” Ben said sadly.   
“I’ll take your word for it,” Lucas told him.


	32. Torn

Shan’s sleeve had a hole torn in it. He had been just about to assassinate al-Baghdadi. He had seen him with his almost bald head, and bushy beard. President Trump had put a bounty on his head of a million dollars. Shan was technically on leave, so he didn’t have backup from the UEO with him, but he had found al-Baghdadi thanks to Lucas’ hacking skills. They would split the million dollars, if Shan could just catch him without getting himself killed. He watched him carefully through the scope on his sniper rifle. He was talking to someone Shan didn’t recognize, but those were the only two people in evidence anywhere around. It was now or never. Shan pulled the trigger, and watched as al-Baghdadi crumpled to the floor. His conversation partner hit the floor too, hiding himself behind a car. Shan knew he had to get out of there before this man called an alarm and they found him. He ran. It had been a quarter of a mile shot, and they’d look much closer first. He got to a busy street and then started walking down the street. He didn’t exactly fit in, being Korean in Iraq, but he could be any soldier, and wasn’t necessarily the man who had just killed al-Baghdadi. He went to the nearest army base and told them what he had done. They seemed to not quite believe him, but sent helicopters to check out the area, and confirmed the kill. “Congratulations, sailor,” said the base commander. “How did you do it?” They debriefed him at length, and finally sent him back to the seaQuest, with a million dollars to his name.


	33. Danger

“Danger!” Darwin chirped.   
“Danger where, Darwin?” Lucas asked, with boredom evident in his voice.   
“Danger Shark,” Darwin answered.   
“Where?”   
Darwin looked at him side eyed. All of a sudden someone called over the intercom “Captain, there’s a shark in the moon pool.”   
“What kind of shark?” Nathan asked.   
“A hammer head,” came the reply.   
“Shit” Lucas swore.   
“Shit” Nathan swore. “How did that get here?”   
“We did just let Darwin out to feed,” Kristin reported. “I suppose it just followed him in,”   
“Block off the moon pool and keep Darwin out of there, then open the doors and see if he swims outside on his own,” Nathan commanded the bridge. His orders were immediately carried out, but the shark had moved out of the moon pool before he got trapped in there. He was swimming through the tubes, towards the bridge. The only positive that Nathan could see was that Darwin was trapped on the opposite side of the moon pool with Lucas in Mammal Engineering.   
The shark made his way to the bridge and lunged out of the water., landing with a crash in the water against the glass.   
“Close the pool!” Commander Ford ordered, and it was immediately done. The shark swam around looking at them.   
“Maybe we can put some blood in the water, and the shark will follow it back here?” Kristin suggested, back at the moon pool.   
“Do we have blood?” Nathan asked.   
Kristin pulled a scalpel out of her medical supplies and cut her finger. A few drops of blood fell into the water, and like clockwork, the shark followed the scent back to the moon pool. They trapped him there, and opened the sea doors and just waited until the shark finally left.


	34. Neutral

Nothing aboard the seaQuest was neutral toned. Everything was either blue or bright yellow. It made it quite jarring when one had to go to UEO headquarters, Nathan thought. Everything surrounding him was neutral. Even the art work was merely inoffensive. He scanned his handprint on the black box allowing him access to the Admirals.   
“Captain Bridger, so good to see you,” one of them, whose name he could never remember, said, offering a hand.   
“Admiral,” he replied, taking the hand, and uncertain whether he should also salute.   
“Don’t worry about formalities here, besides, I’m hardly the highest ranking in the room,” the man answered his question without being asked.   
“Nathan!” Bill called out, coming over to him.   
“Bill!” Nathan replied happily.   
“Don’t worry about a thing. The admirals just want to get your opinion on how the science and military contingents are getting along on your ship. We’re considering expanding the experiment to put science crews on a few more submarines, and we’d like to hear how it’s going on the seaQuest.”   
“Honestly, it’s tricky, Bill,” Nathan started.   
“Hold that thought,” Bill interrupted, and called everyone to order. Everyone sat down at a long chair with Bill at one head and Nathan at the other. The other Admirals sat along the sides.   
“Alright, we are here to discuss the science experiment aboard seaQuest,” Bill said, “You were saying it’s tricky?”   
“It is. Many of the career navy people don’t understand the science types, and we get a good number of complaints. I understand from Dr. Westphalen that it was worse before I came aboard.”   
“It was,” Bill acknowledged.   
“My honest opinion is that if you want to expand this experiment, you need to carefully pick your captains for their scientific backgrounds, like, I assume, you picked me.”   
“Thank you for your candor. While you have everyone’s ear, is there anything else you’d like to add on the matter?”   
“No, thank you, I think I’ve said everything I need to say,” Nathan answered him.   
“Great. I’ll see you out,” Bill said, standing up. Everyone else stood up after him, and he and Nathan made their ways through the neutral hallways and back outside to the bustling city of Pearl Harbor.


	35. Mate

Going from Captain of the seaQuest to First Mate of the seaQuest wasn’t exactly Commander Ford’s first choice, but then again, he knew that he would not have been given the command if it weren’t to immediately give up the command to Captain Bridger. Still, he was usually cool as a cucumber under pressure, and now he was ordered to freeze and panic and not be himself. He would give the Captain a bad first impression of him, and who’s to say the captain would then choose to make him his first mate?   
In the end, it wouldn’t matter. The situation turned a lot more dangerous than he had expected, and he had legitimately frozen. Most of Admiral Noyce’s plan did work. Captain Bridger assumed command, and dealt with the problem, and he was back on the team. Unfortunately, it came with a cost. People had died at that civilian station the Delta submarine had attacked. And Commander Ford had learned something about himself he had believed impossible. He wasn’t always cool under pressure. He was cool under pressure because the super sub gave him every advantage. As soon as he lost his advantage, he lost his cool, too. He panicked and someone else had to pick up the slack.


	36. Fly

“How exactly does a fly get onto a submarine? We’re under water. We access the entrances from submersibles under water. We never surface except to dry-dock, and we haven’t done that in 6 months. So how, exactly, is it that there is a fly flying in front of my computer? You would think they’d all be dead already.” Ben continued to try to squash the fly that was vexing him.   
“It must have gotten into a shuttle and then in here from there,” Tim said, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s just a fly, why don’t you ignore it?”   
“It keeps buzzing in my face!” Ben answered angrily clapping his hands again.   
“You’re the keeper of the things. Don’t you have fly paper traps?” Tim tried to be reasonable.   
“No, I didn’t think to order any because I didn’t know I’d need fly traps on a submarine,” Ben spat out. He clapped again, then looked at his hands. This time he had fly guts on them. He reached for the nearest purel dispenser and wiped his hands together.   
“Gross,” Tim said.   
“You’re telling me,” Ben said, wiping his hands in his pants. “So I need to order some fly paper.” He opened an excel document that listed everything a supply officer could possibly order from the UEO and searched through it. “You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s not in here. It would be a special order, and I’d have to order tons of it. Bridger will never go for that.”   
“The flies aren’t a big deal down here. Just one or two every once in a while,” Tim said.   
“I hate the flies,” Ben answered. But Tim just shrugged.


	37. Loud

“Lucas! Turn that down! How do you even think with all that racket?” Bridger ordered.   
“How do you think without it?” Lucas shot back.   
“You’d better learn. You can’t wear headphones on the bridge,” Nathan told him, holding out his hand.   
“I’ll put it away,” Lucas frowned.   
“See that you do,” Nathan said, turning back to the WSKRS image on the main screen. “Do you see why I asked you up here?” he asked Lucas  
“It looks as though the lens is scratched,” Lucas said looking at the image, also.   
“It does, but we’ve already replaced the lens and it didn’t change at all. We’re worried we’re being fed a false image,” Nathan told him.   
“So you want me to confirm that, and track it down?” Lucas asked.   
“Exactly”  
“No problem,” Lucas said, taking his iPhone and heading back to his room. 

An hour later Lucas called Bridger over the communicator. “I think you’d better come down here,” he said.   
Nathan knocked on Lucas’ door. “What have you found?”   
“We are being fed a false image, but the weird thing is it seems to be coming from UEO command.” Lucas looked at him. 

Nathan called Bill Noyce. “Bill, I’m being fed a false image from UEO command. Mind telling me what that’s all about?”   
“Nathan, we meant to call you. Someone has been feeding false images into all our computer databases for a week. We’re not sure who or why.”   
“I can lend you Lucas,” Nathan offered.   
“Good idea. I’ll send him the data.” 

Lucas called Bill “You’re being hacked by the North Koreans. I don’t know how, since they have no internet, but the origination of the source is Pyongyang.”   
“Can you block them?” Bill asked.   
“I already have,” Lucas answered.


	38. Touch

Nathan had set out a picnic in his room. Kristin joined him, and they ate sandwiches and fruits and cheeses. He touched her face sensuously. “May I kiss you, doctor?” he asked, again, for the first time since Lucas had interrupted their first make out session.  
“Of course” she said again. He moved forward, surreptitiously checking to make sure the holovids were all off. He took her face in his hands, and moved his lips towards hers. In a moment of perfection they connected. The moment lasted only a few seconds before she pulled away and took his face in her hands.   
“What’s wrong?”   
“Nothing,” she answered him, leaning in to kiss him again. They moved to his bed and she pulled his jumpsuit off his shoulders. He touched her shoulders. “May I?” he asked, and she agreed. He pulled the jumpsuit off of her shoulders, exposing her soft breasts. They fell backwards onto the bed. “Doctor, may I make love to you?” Nathan asked. “Of course,” she answered, and he finished stripping her, and made love to her. Afterwards, they held each other tightly. “I think I love you, Kristin.”   
“I think I love you too,” she whispered. He held her, and they fell asleep together. The next day, Kristin would have to leave, but for now, everything was perfect.


	39. Seek

“Harry Potter totally could have played professional quidditch as a seeker if he’d wanted to,” Lucas argued.   
“No way. He was decent for high school sports but without college training, he’d have had no chance against the professionals,” Ben shot back.   
“He was the best because he had a natural talent for it, and seeker takes more natural talent than anything else,” Lucas retorted.   
“Ask anyone who has languished in minor league baseball how much natural talent matters in the big leagues. All of those guys had natural talent.”   
“Yeah, but how many wizards are there total? Like 200? There’s not much competition for the top spots.”   
“There’s gotta be more than 200 wizards. Look at scenes in the movies, like the Battle of Hogwarts. There are hundreds of wizards.”   
“The movies didn’t accurately portray the books though. There’s really only like 200 wizards.” Lucas shook his head at Ben. “The movies way overblown the number of wizards there are.”   
“My life is a lie!” Ben exclaimed suddenly.   
Lucas laughed. “Sorry Ben, but Hollywood screws up every book they touch in some way or other.”   
“What else is a lie?” Ben asked.   
“Hermione isn’t hot. She has bushy hair and buck teeth throughout the entire series.”   
“No!” Ben exclaimed.   
“Read the books,” Lucas laughed.   
“No! I don’t want to know.” Ben answered.   
“The books are better anyway.”   
“The books are for children.” Ben said.   
“The books are popular amongst adults,” Lucas told him.


	40. Argue

Tim and Miguel stood in the moon pool. They were off and on wrestling. Tim was beating Miguel almost 75% of the time. “What’s your secret?” Miguel asked Tim.   
“I don’t have a secret,” Tim told him. “I have God.”   
“Your god cares about a wrestling match?”   
“My God cares about everything I do.”   
“Then why doesn’t your god care about starving children in Africa?”   
“He does care, that’s why he created people who care,” Tim answered.   
“Yet he watches over you specifically? How full of yourself.”   
“Try it” Tim said. “Go over there and pray to win a wrestling match and we’ll see what happens.”   
“This is ridiculous,” Miguel answered.   
“Just try it.”   
So Miguel walked to the side, and prayed to lose a wrestling match while telling Tim that he was praying to win. To no one’s surprise, he won the wrestling match.   
“See?” Tim said, “when you pray god answers”  
“Yeah, I prayed to lose.” Miguel told him.   
“Why would you do that?”   
“To separate God from your expectations,” Miguel told him. “Besides didn’t God say not to test him?”   
“It’s not a test to ask him for something, for a sign.” Tim answered.   
“Well I asked him for a sign and he failed to deliver. Just like he fails to deliver for all those African kids. Face it Tim, your god doesn’t exist.”   
“My God exists,” Tim answered. “He just doesn’t like deception,”


	41. Work

Lucas walked around the bridge with a clipboard and piece of paper. He listened to Nathan give orders and people repeated them back to him along with the word “aye.” He tried to suss out where people’s personalities shone through the military training. He admittedly did not find many places for this to be true on the well-running bridge. Tim and Miguel occasionally had side conversations over the headsets until Katie caught them and told them to knock it off. Lucas suspected that as long as it wasn’t bad for morale, she allowed them to talk. Miguel sometimes made patterns out of the WSKRS. Commander Ford was strictly married to the military. Everything was by the book with him, and Lucas didn’t see any signs of his personality shining through.   
After his day observing he sat down with Nathan. “What did you learn?” he asked. “I learned that there is little room for a personality on the bridge of a ship, and that you make yourself subservient to the ship in every way. Only Tim and Miguel seemed to have any personality at all. “That’s probably true,” Nathan admitted. “But what did you see about the way people work together?”   
“People work with you perfectly, but they don’t really interact with each other at all.” Lucas suggested.   
“Everyone has their own job, it’s true, but Miguel has to work with navigation to make sure we don’t lose WSKRS. Tim has to work with Miguel to see what language to try reading in or communicating in if we need to speak to anyone else,” Nathan said.   
“Rare occasions, I think.” Lucas said.   
“Perhaps,” Nathan said. “Who do you think you’d like to work with?”   
“Hitchcock,” Lucas said without thinking twice. “I want to learn how to use the VR probe.”   
“I should have known. Okay. You can report to her Monday morning to begin your job.”


	42. Sink

“Hull Breach decks three and four.” Miguel yelled out over the chaos.   
“I always hate hearing that. I’m convinced we’re going to sink,” Lt O’Neil said to him as Bridger dispatched people to fix the hull breach.   
“An attack like that one, we would have if we were in any other submarine,” Miguel answered. He looked shaken up. 

“Someone had better check on that other sub,” Bridger announced. “Make sure they truly are disabled.”   
“We only hit their propulsion units,” Katie said, “they can’t follow us, but their weapons are still functional if they see us.”   
“Board them,” Bridger said, “Take Crocker and 3 security men, and arrest everyone aboard.”   
Crocker called his three best men and they boarded the downed sub. Someone shot at them from behind a bulkhead, and Crocker shot back, killing the man. As soon as that man died, the others came out with their hands up. Crocker arrested them and brought them back to the seaQuest. A brief interrogation revealed that they were trying to take out the seaQuest so that they could be pirates without repercussions. The man Crocker shot was the captain, and the only one who was really for that plan. The others were petty thieves and didn’t want to hurt anyone.


	43. Nut

Ben sat at his table in the officer’s mess, lobbing cashews at Tim. His aim was terrible and the nuts were falling behind Tim or hitting the table. When he finally managed to hit Tim with a cashew, Tim turned around, “what the heck?” he asked. Ben ducked his head and laughed.   
“Problem?” Tim asked.   
“Nope,” Ben said eating a handful of the cashews. Right then, commander Ford came in and asked why there were cashews all over the floor. Ben said nothing, and Ford said, “I actually wanted an answer to that,” so Tim answered, “Ben’s been throwing them at me,”   
“Tattletale” Ben hissed.   
“Lieutenant, you will sweep both this mess hall and the enlisted mess hall, and you’ll do it immediately,” Ford answered. Ben finished his cashews in one more mouthful, and then moved towards the supply closet. He grabbed a dust buster, but Ford stopped him, “no you’ll do this the old fashioned way,” and handed him a small broom that would require him to kneel on the floor while he swept the nuts up.   
“But sir,” Ben started.   
“No buts. We will learn to behave like adults, or we will be treated like children,” Ford said.


	44. Stuck

“I’m tired of being stuck on this submarine!” Lucas raged.   
“I thought you liked it here,” Nathan tried calming him down.   
“I do, most of the time, but it would be nice if there were anyone else my age. A girl, maybe?” Lucas pouted.   
“Girls your age are generally in high school,” Nathan reminded him. Lucas shrugged his shoulders.   
“Have you ever been with people your own age?” Nathan asked.   
“No. I skipped straight to the 3rd grade, and then skipped middle school easily,” Lucas admitted. “But my dad always made sure I had friends my own age somewhere.”   
“Well, you have the internet now,” Nathan told him. “You’ve got Nick and Julianna.”   
“Sure, but the internet isn’t the same thing at all.” Lucas said. “I mean you can talk and whatever, but there’s no one to have dinner with or whatever. Or see a movie. No one remembered my birthday.”   
“Oh Lucas, is that what this is about? I’m so sorry I forgot. It’s hard to keep days apart down here, you know?” Nathan was chagrined.   
“I mean I got a hundred messages from people in my past life on Facebook for my birthday, but nothing from anyone here.”   
“I guess 16 is supposed to be a bigger deal, isn’t it?” Nathan asked.  
“Well, I mean, if I lived on land I’d be getting a drivers license, and I can’t even do that.”   
“I’ll tell you what, next time we dry dock I’ll take you to get a learner’s license, and teach you to drive.” Nathan suggested.   
“Will you? Thanks,” Lucas smiled slightly.   
“I will,” Nathan promised.


	45. Animal

Darwin chattered “animal! Animal!” over and over again.   
“What do you mean, animal, Darwin?” Lucas asked, frustratedly looking at his equipment to see if it was malfunctioning.   
“Animal” Darwin said again, this time swimming to the sea doors. Lucas looked. An octopus was attempting to squeeze its way out of the seaQuest. How it had gotten in was a mystery, but at least it wasn’t a shark this time. Lucas watched it slowly squeeze its body through a hole the size of a tennis ball. It slowly oozed one limb after the next out the hole. Finally nothing was left but the very top part of the octopus, and Lucas watched as it squeezed its beak through the hole and disappeared into the open ocean outside.   
“Very good, Darwin. Animal. That’s an octopus.” Lucas said. He punched a few buttons and the program began to translate that particular grouping of sounds into “octopus.” Lucas tried showing Darwin a few more pictures of animals, but they all came out “octopus” instead of animal. Lucas pushed a few buttons again, and the translation reverted to animal. There was a different word for shark, but most prey animals were merely “animal.” Danger had a different word, but food was all the same.


	46. Pray

Nathan stood at the front of the church staring at the crucifix at the front of the building.   
“You took my son. You took my wife. Why?” He asked aloud.   
“God, you’ve taken my whole life away,” he continued, “and yet you’ve brought me Lucas and Kristin. They can’t replace the originals, but I appreciate them. Still, I’m mad at you, and I don’t know that I can ever get over it.”   
“Why am I praying?” he asked himself. “Why am I praying?” he asked aloud.   
“Perhaps because you have come here looking for something,” came a voice from behind him.   
Bridger spun. “Father, I’m sorry. I’ll leave.” He began walking out.   
“Stay as long as you want. I was just coming in to meditate myself.” The father answered him. “But it seems I have come at the perfect time to help you answer some questions.”   
“God killed my family,” Nathan said, “and now I have a family of choice surrounding me, but I’m terrified he’ll take them, too.”   
“It’s important not to think of the bad things that happen to us as God being out to get us,” the priest told him. “Bad things happen to good people all the time, and it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love us. Remember that as much as it hurt to lose your family, having your new family also comes from God.”   
“Yeah, yeah I guess they are. Thank you Father.’ Nathan said, and then turned to leave.


	47. Kill

Shan looked at Dr Levin. “Then he said shoot to kill,” he said, “and I turned my stun gun to kill, and then a little girl jumped up and startled me, and then there was gun fire. And I shoot, and I shoot right at the little girl, and she falls. And she looks at me and asks “why did you kill me?” and I have no answer for her,” he shifted subtly into the first person when he got to the worst part of the memory, an almost certain sign of PTSD.   
“Would she have killed you if you hadn’t killed her?”   
“No, I think she was an innocent,” Shan said.   
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Levin said. “Now we have to work on coping skills. Have you heard of cognitive behavioral therapy?” he asked.   
“I have, but I’ve never tried it.’ Shan said.   
“It basically involves looking at the ABCs. Antecedents, behaviors, and consequences. For example, what makes you think of that little girl?”   
“Everything does. Lucas’ age does, whenever he has female friends.”   
“Okay so you see a girl about her age, and then you think of her. What are the consequences of those thoughts?”   
“I’m scared, jumpy. I can’t live with myself,” Shan answered.   
“Okay, so basically we’re going to work on breaking this pattern,” Levin said.


	48. Light

The light never changes on a submarine. Day, Night. Summer, Winter. It’s all the same. So when the lights in the hallway went out, Lucas was scared. He listened for the red alert, but it never came. He walked back to his room, and the lights were off there, too, but the computer was still on. The electricity wasn’t out. It was all very curious. “Captain?” he called into his communicator.   
“I see it Lucas,” the captain answered. “Katie’s already on her way down.” Lucas listened to the quiet. Eventually he got nervous and felt the butterflies in his stomach. He grabbed the vocorder. “Darwin?” he asked. Darwin swam up next to him and opened his mouth in a grin at him.   
“Is there light anywhere on this submarine Darwin?” Lucas asked.   
“No.” Darwin answered him simply.   
“Do you remember your mother?” Lucas asked the dolphin.   
“Yes. Mother left Darwin. Time to go.”   
“My mother left me too, Darwin.” Lucas answered. “I don’t know if it was time to go, but she left my father and me, and from then on she just wrote cards on my birthday and Christmas.”   
“Wrote cards?”   
“Yeah, like, she got in touch twice a year,” Lucas realized that dolphins had no concept of writing a card.   
“Lucas misses his mother,” Darwin chirped.   
“Yeah, yeah I do.” Lucas answered.


	49. Cold

It was always precisely 68 degrees on the submarine, whether it was the middle of summer or the middle of winter. Lucas found this slightly uncomfortably cold. Everyone around him wore the military uniforms that resembled wetsuits and kept the wearer warm. Lucas wore jeans and tops. Even though he wore long pants, he was cold. He bundled up in a jacket. Then he got in the shuttle to head up to Pearl Harbor. He got off the submersible, and swore, “oh shit, it’s July,” he said. He put the jacket back on the sub, but was still wearing long pants and long sleeves, and it was south Hawaii. At least the mosquitoes wouldn’t get him he thought. That thought lasted seconds before he realized they were swarming him as he sweated and they were all in his line of vision, and landing on his hands and lower arms. “Gross,” he thought swatting at them. “Where are we going?”   
“I don’t know, Lucas, I thought you were going to see your friends,” Ben answered.   
“I didn’t make any plans,” Lucas said. “But I can go to the university and see if anyone is there,” he said taking off in that general direction.


	50. Affair

Miguel stopped by Ben’s room. “Hey Ben, you, uh, you got any condoms?” he asked.   
“Sure, where you going?” Ben asked.   
“Oh, umm no where,” he answered, avoiding the question.   
“Okay, sure,” he answered rummaging through supplies until he came up with a box of condoms. He tossed them at Miguel, who caught them easily.   
“Thanks Ben” he said, leaving looking furtive. He made his way down the hallway and to his new “friend” Leonor’s room.   
“You get them?” she asked.   
“Yeah,” he answered holding the prize in his left hand. She leaned in and kissed him. He kissed her back, and walked in the room and closed the door. She moved towards the bed, although it was only a twin bed. He knew from experience that two people could lie on it, but not comfortably. They sat together, and he reached to pull her jump suit off of her shoulders. She pulled his off, too. They lay together, and experienced one another as only new lovers can do. He kicked her locker, and it opened, exposing a picture of a man.   
“Who’s this?” he asked.  
“Oh umm, nobody,” she answered looking away from him.   
“Is this an affair?” he asked, accusingly.   
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She answered.   
“How do you not know? Are you married?”   
“Yes, I am, but he had an affair, and it’s ending.”  
“So I’m the rebound,” he asked. She looked down and said nothing.


	51. Restaurant

Lucas, Ben, Tim, and Miguel approached the Outback Steakhouse in Pearl Harbor. It was a favorite place to grab a fake steak when they were in the region, as they often were as it was the only dock large enough for the seaQuest to dock and allow the entire crew to all go ashore at the same time. “Hi I’m Austin. If you forget my name, just think it’s like Texas,” said the server.   
“Hi Dallas,” said Lucas.   
“Haha you’re so funny” Austin said.   
“Sorry Katy,” Lucas said.   
“Okay! So what can I get you to drink?”   
“Beer” said Miguel, and Ben. “Lemonade” said Tim. “Beer?” Asked Lucas.   
“Sorry kid, you can’t be more than 16. Try again or show some ID.”   
“Alright, I’ll have a lemonade, too,” he answered.   
“Good, I’ll be right back.”   
Ben looked at his friends. “First person to check their phones pays the bill,” he said putting his phone upside down in the middle of the table. The others followed suit. Across the room, a baby started to fuss.   
“God, control your kids,” Lucas complained.   
“Yeah, you should just go no where until your kids are grown, is that it?” Tim asked.   
“No, but take them out if they get disruptive,” Lucas defended himself.


	52. Movie

“Now no funny business, you two,” Nick said to Lucas and Julianna.   
“That’s what movie theaters are for,” Juliana protested.   
“I don’t wanna hear it. This is a kids’ movie.”   
“Okay, okay,” they both said.   
They were on their way to see Despicable Me 4, which they hoped would be a return to the original movies and not a repeat of the third, which had come out the year before. They were pretty certain they were going to be the oldest ones in the theater who weren’t there supervising kids, but they had enjoyed these movies since they started coming out several years before, when they were young enough to be in the target audience. The previews played. “Look!” Lucas said to Julianna, “they’re coming out with a new hotel Transylvania!”   
“I know! I want to see that. Maybe next time you’re in town,” she answered. “I love funny vampires.”   
“Did you like Twilight?” he asked.   
“No, God no. That’s like pedophile vampires,” she answered.   
“Pedophile sparkly vampires,” Lucas added laughing.   
“Vampires do not sparkle!” Nick interjected. “Vampires burst into flames and die in the sunshine. They do not sparkle.”  
“Did you ever watch that 80s movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” Lucas asked.   
“No,” Nick and Julianna both answered.   
“Oh god, we need movie night ASAP.” Lucas exclaimed.


	53. Wait

“We can’t wait forever, Lucas,” Commander Ford said into his cell phone. “All aboard time was 2100.”   
“What do you mean we can’t wait forever?” asked Shan. “The Captain isn’t even here yet.”   
“That’s why we can wait at all,” Ford told him. “But in about an hour we’ll have to pay for an extra day at the dock, and UEO command will not be very happy about that.”   
“Can we leave them a shuttle on the beach?” Shan asked.   
“If need be we can send a shuttle back for them, but Lucas can’t drive a shuttle.” Ford answered. 

About half an hour later, Ford was muttering to himself, “Where is Captain Bridger and Lucas?”   
“Traffic was awful when I came in. I was aiming to be here around 1900 and didn’t get here until 2100. If they were aiming for 2100 they could be hours late,” Tim told him, although he hadn’t directly been asked.   
“When it rains in Vietnam, traffic snarls. People should know this by now and make accommodations,”   
“I once got kicked out of my taxi in Vietnam because the driver didn’t think he could make a profit given all the traffic,” Miguel interjected. 

At 2230, Lucas and the Captain came aboard together. “Man, we got kicked out of our taxi and had to ride on the back of motorcycles, driving down the sidewalk to get here!” Lucas exclaimed. “This traffic is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”   
“Wait until you see India,” Nathan told him with a knowing smile.


	54. Patient

“Do I get a scar?” Lucas asked.   
“You do not get a scar, but you do get a lovely cast,” Kristin answered him, “do you want blue, green, or beige?”   
“Green,” Lucas muttered. He had only just stopped crying, and was feeling the effects of the diamorphine. Now that he wasn’t in agony, he felt pretty stupid. Running to the moon pool had not been one of his better ideas, and although Ben had gone along with it, Lucas had suggested the race, and then run ahead of Ben. He had slipped, and hit his head and broken his arm trying to break his fall on the side of the pool. Of course there was water at the edge of the moon pool. Not only did Darwin like to splash, but there was open water on a moving boat.   
Kristin wrapped his arm in green plaster, then dried it and gave him a bottle of oxycodone. “One every 8 hours, Lucas, and not a single bit sooner,” she said.   
“Sure, doc.” He answered, taking the bottle in his left hand and getting up to leave.   
Then she called Ben on the communicator. Ben came down to med bay. “How’s Lucas?” he asked.   
“He’ll be fine. He’s broken his arm, and will be uncomfortable for a while.”   
“Oh, man, I’ll go fix him up a bowl of ice cream,” Ben suggested.   
“Yes, but first I want to talk to you. You are the adult. He’s only 16. You need to be the responsible party when he wants to do things that are clearly stupid.”   
“I know. I didn’t realize how stupid it was either.” Ben answered.   
“How do you not know it’s stupid to run around a body of water?” she asked him.   
“I’m sorry, doc.”  
“Good, now go get Lucas that ice cream. He’s probably trying to figure out how to use a computer one handed.”   
Ben and Kristin laughed because they knew that was exactly what Lucas was doing.


	55. Crime

“We tower over everyone here” Lucas laughed. Commander Ford agreed. They walked down the street in Ho Chi Minh City. They walked through a market, which smelled of dead fish, and had buckets of still alive sea food. There were stores on every corner selling $1 DVDs. They were all bootlegged, and Ford wouldn’t even allow the group to walk into them, lest they be accused of supporting bootlegging. He wouldn’t allow them to buy any bootlegged DVDs, certainly, and would order Ben not to play any for community movie nights. As they walked, a gaggle of six to ten year old children started surrounding Lucas. Some of them begged him for money, but most of them surrounded him and just swarmed around him. Then, just as suddenly, they all left. 

They found themselves at a souvenir shop. Lucas looked at some t-shirts, and decided he wanted one. He reached for his wallet, and didn’t find it. “Dammit” he swore.   
“What’s wrong?” Ford asked.   
“Those kids must have stolen my wallet. I can’t find it anywhere.”   
“I wondered if that’s what they were up to.” Ford said.   
“Why didn’t you say something?” Lucas asked.   
“They left before I could,” Ford answered.   
“I guess I’d best go back to the ship and cancel my credit cards,” Lucas said. “Can I borrow a couple bucks to get a rickshaw back?”   
“I’ll come with you, I’m tired of being out here anyway.” Ford answered, leaving the shop a step behind Lucas.


	56. Choke

“No contest, the Marlins are the best team in baseball” Lucas announced to the table.   
“The Cubs have won two world series in a row,” Tim told him “I think objectively that makes them a better team.”   
“Yeah but how long was it before that since the Cubs won?”   
“Just because of that g-“and he stopped suddenly. He turned pale, and put his hands around his own throat.   
“Tim?”   
Lucas stood up, knocking over his chair. “Help! Get Kristin!” he yelled to nobody in particular. Then he grabbed Tim from behind and attempted to do the Heimlich maneuver, which he had never been trained in. Miguel radioed for Kristin, who got on the MagLev immediately and headed down to the mess hall. Lucas was still grabbing Tim, who had turned pale and looked terrified.   
Kristin shoved Lucas out of the way, and grabbed Tim from behind. Pushing up on his stomach, until he coughed up a piece of pretzel he had swallowed wrong.   
“Choking on a pretzel? Looking to be president?” Kristin asked. Tim laughed. Lucas looked confused.   
“President Bush choked on a pretzel, Lucas,” Tim explained.   
“He’s more qualified than the current buffoon,” Lucas stated. “Honestly, I don’t know how you can serve in the navy under him.”   
Tim shook his head. “I’ll outlast him,” he said, happily enough.


	57. Fever

“Doc, I feel like death,” Lucas complained.   
“You don’t look too good. Why don’t you hop up on this table and let us take a look at you,” she said gesturing to a doctor’s table. He hopped up. She produced a thermometer. “103.7. That’s very not good. What other symptoms are you having?” she asked.   
“Nausea, vomiting, headache,” he listed off.   
“Joint pain?”   
“Now that you mention it, yeah,” he answered.   
“Alright, I suspect a flu. Let me just get a test for that,” she said, digging through supplies in a closet. “Ah hah. Here we go. I’m just going to stick this up your nose, and then we’ll test it and see if it’s the flu.” She did so. Lucas instinctively jerked back from the invasion of his nose, but she got what she needed. “Why don’t you go back to your room and lie down. I’ll tell you the results when I get them,” she offered, when he looked a little wobbly. He walked back to his room and was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. An hour later she radioed him and told him he had the flu. “Nothing to do for it, but rest and drink liquids. I’ll have someone come by with soup. Stay in your room as much as possible so you don’t infect the whole crew.”   
“Not a problem,” he thought, he didn’t really want to leave his room anyway.   
“If you can’t hold down the liquid for more than 2 days come back and we’ll give you IV fluids and anti-emetics.”   
“Can someone bring me a bucket?” he asked.   
“Sure. I’ll send someone right away with soup and a bucket,” she told him. He fell asleep again without saying thanks or goodbye.


	58. Summer

Up until this year, summer indicated a break. It was time to escape school; even grad school classes ended and you could just focus on your research. Now, nothing changed. Not even the temperature or apparent sunlight changed on a submarine to indicate that one had moved into summer. Lucas liked having the extended days when he lived on land. But here the lights were on from 0600 hours to 2000 hours every day, 365 days a year. I mean, technically that was like living in summer year round, but the temperature never changed. It was 68 degrees Fahrenheit every day with no variation either for the seasons nor the time of day.   
This time Lucas looked at his friends getting out of classes to go on adventures with their families with some jealousy. Juliana was headed to Florida with her family, to go to the beach. Lucas and the seaQuest frequently found themselves in New Cape Quest, but they wouldn’t be there during the time Juliana was there. He had tried to ask to borrow the stinger to drive out and see her, but apparently the seaQuest was almost to Japan, which was just too far for the little speed racer to go, and too far for Captain Bridger to trust him to make it there and back alive. He hadn’t been allowed to use the stinger since his drunk driving incident a month ago and he wasn’t sure when or if that level of grounding was going to be finished.   
Nick was even luckier. He was going SCUBA diving in Hawaii during his break. Lucas had been to Hawaii of course, as it was one of the few ports the seaQuest could dock at. But he had never tried SCUBA diving. He had never seen a sea turtle in person. And as Nick said, who knows, there might not ever be another time to see one. Lucas tried to argue that it was only a fraction of the distance to see Nick as Juliana, but Bridger was not in the mood to give him back the keys to the Stinger, and it was still a really long journey.


	59. Eat

Lucas stared at the computer screen in front of him. His eyes were glassy, and his mouth hanging open. Bridger walked in the room and put a cheeseburger next to him. “Eat, Lucas,” he said. He shook his head. Lucas suddenly stopped, and looked confused, “wha?” he asked. He noticed the burger. “How long has this been here?”   
“I just put it there,” Bridger answered and then said, “good to see you back in the land of the living,”   
“Something funny is happening with the World Bank.” Lucas told him. “It’s like if you’re getting gas and it’s $2.9999, that extra $.0001 is supposed to round up, but in finance it rounds down. For some reason it’s all rounding up, and going…” he paused, “…somewhere,” he finished. “But I can’t figure out where.”   
“Well, keep at it. I know you can figure it out,” Nathan answered him.   
Lucas stopped, and ate his burger, dangling fries into his mouth before eating them. Suddenly he stopped. Why hadn’t he thought to run a reduction algorithm before? It was the most obvious solution, and yet, he hadn’t even considered it. It was almost as though he considered it too juvenile for himself. He typed. Then, “Captain,” he called, “we have a problem.”


	60. Thirst

Miguel sat on a life raft in the Pacific ocean. His shuttlecraft had run out of gas, and he had become stuck. At first all he could do was lie there, and groan. He probably had nitrogen narcosis, but if he wanted to be found he had to do a few things. First, he set off the homing beacon so the seaQuest would eventually find him. Then he grabbed something to eat from the supply kit. He groaned. The military had thought of a lot of things, but they hadn’t put water on the life rafts. What did they think he was supposed to drink? The ocean? That would kill him faster than not drinking. So he sat there and thought of nothing but a cold glass of water. He dozed in and out of consciousness. He started to rather enjoy the rhythmic ups and downs of the life raft on the ocean waves, after a while. They weren’t too big, but they were big enough to be felt.   
A sound rather like a propeller came from below him, surrounding him. SeaQuest opened their sea doors and he found himself aboard his home again. “Mister Ortiz, what happened?” Commander Ford asked him.   
“I’ll be glad to tell you, commander but first, I just need a glass of water,” he replied starting to make his way to the mess hall.


	61. Chance

“Step right up! Take a chance! Everyone has a chance to win, except the ones who don’t play!” Ben announced loudly at a roulette table, set up in the middle of the mess hall. Lucas came around, “where do I get chips?”   
“You can buy them from me,” Ben announced, “$5 gets you $100 worth of chips. They are good for prizes at the end of the night. All the money collected goes to the Wounded Warrior Project,” Lucas pulled $5 out of his wallet, and joined the crew standing around the table.   
“I’m putting $100 on number 34,” Shan announced, placing a blue chip there.   
“Pretty confident, are you? Okay, I’ll put 5 on red,” someone else said, tossing a chip onto the sidebar. Lucas put a single chip on black.   
“Oh my god, it’s 34!” Ben announced into the microphone. “Chief Shan is going to bankrupt me! How did you know that was going to happen?”   
“I’m just lucky, I guess,” he said, tossing $10 onto black for the next round.   
“Can you do that again? Double or nothing on the number of your choice!” Ben prodded him.   
“Nope, it’ll never happen again. Sorry,” Shan answered, “$10 on black.”   
“$10 on black” Lucas said, “I’m with him now.”   
The next number was red, and Lucas was out of money within the hour. Shan won the chance to choose what movie would be played over the closed circuit television system one night in the auction at the end of the night.


	62. Appear

The image of Wolfman appeared on the InterNex. “Howl Now Frankie?” He asked Lucas. Lucas’ Frankenstein avatar waved in response.   
“I’m stuck Wolfman. I’ve been fighting to find the North Korean hackers who attacked the seaQuest for the last 3 days, and I’m just stuck.” Lucas typed.   
“Show me what you got?”   
Lucas copy and pasted a few lines of code and sent it to Nick. “So the problem is in here somewhere. They managed to get ahold of our propulsion systems, but that’s it. We need to know how to guard ourselves against future attacks, but still leave override capabilities for the UEO.”   
“Did they get in directly or through the UEO?” Nick asked.   
“It must have been directly, Lucas answered. “Otherwise they’d have had our weapons control first.”   
“Oh, try here, on line 365. That’s how we hacked into the UEO system to get you to Node 3. It’s a weakness and it shows up in both situations.”   
“Thanks, Nick. I’ll see you at Christmas?” Lucas asked.   
“Sure thing. We’ll be in Pearl Harbor the entire month.”  
“We’re coming in on the 15th and leaving on January 10th. I have to see my parents in there, but probably not for more than a day. They don’t really have any more time for me now than they did when they sent me here.”   
“Will you spend Christmas with Bridger?” Nick asked.   
“Probably not. He’ll be back on his island the entire time. I’ll probably spend it with Ben. Since the divorce, he’s got no one either.” Lucas answered.


	63. Whisper

“Ben, it’s over. You need to stop obsessing over me,” Katie told him.   
“I know it’s over, but Katie…”   
“Don’t but Katie me,” she interrupted. She stormed away  
“I’ve always loved you,” he whispered into the air. He turned towards the moon pool, and punched the edge of it. “Dammit,” he yelled into the nothingness.   
Darwin appeared, as if out of no where.   
“Ben angry?” he asked.   
“No, I’m not angry, Darwin. At least, not at anybody else,” Ben answered, honestly, “Maybe I’m a little angry at myself. I had such a perfect thing, and then… and then I just let it all go. Because I’m an idiot.”   
“Ben is not an idiot,” the dolphin chirped.   
“Thanks, buddy, I appreciate that, but this time I truly was an idiot. I couldn’t keep up with basic cleanliness that the military demanded, and Katie couldn’t let me get in the way of her career. And now, I have to be cleaner than she ever wanted me to be to keep my position on this sub, so it was obviously possible for me, and I just didn’t do it. I’m an idiot.”   
“But Ben can tell Katie that,” Darwin said.   
“Well, I just tried, but she said it’s still over, and will always be over. I guess dreams don’t come true.”


	64. Day

Lucas opened his eyes. It was day. He was moving. Floating maybe? He wasn’t wet, so he must still be in the Stinger. He looked to the side. He was still in the stinger, but the top was off, and he was in the middle of the ocean. He pressed the button to close the top, but nothing happened. He pressed it a few more times as if that would help matters. Then he looked towards the front of him. There was a large dent in the front right of the Stinger. It was right where the lid would need to attach. “Shit.” He swore, trying to remember anything from the night before. He didn’t remember getting in the Stinger at all, or driving, or wrecking. He remembered going to Biff’s party. He didn’t remember leaving. He pressed the MayDay Button, which would summon the seaQuest to his position. Then he groaned. The high pitched squeal it emitted was killing his head. As was the light. He grabbed his head. He couldn’t be lucky enough to find any Advil or anything with him. He closed his eyes, but then the unseen dips and bobs of the ocean made him nauseous. “Captain Bridger is going to kill me,” he muttered, reopening his eyes.


	65. Scream

“Captain?” Tim O’Neil yelled, taking off his headphones.   
“Mister O’Neil?” Bridger acknowledged him.   
“I’m picking up… something. It sounds like screaming on the emergency band. But I can’t make out any words.”  
“Try acknowledging them, Mister O’Neil” Bridger suggested.   
“No change, sir,” O’Neil responded in a few moments.   
“On screen.” Bridger commanded, and Tim flipped a few buttons. The sound of a young girl screaming filled the room, but there was nothing but static on the screen. “Mister Ortiz, triangulate?” Ortiz began pushing buttons, also.   
“It seems to be coming from Daymar Facility, sir,” he eventually said.   
“Take us there.” The seaQuest made a sudden change of course.   
“Alright, what am I walking into, Commander?” Bridger asked Katie.   
“Daymar Facility is a mental institution. It could be nothing but a patient managing to get ahold of the MayDay call. On the other hand, it houses the most unpredictable people, and we could be walking into almost anything,” she filled him in as best as she could.   
“Who decided to put the mentally ill underwater?” he muttered.   
They arrived, and what they found was worse than they were prepared for. There was a screaming young woman, who was probably 13 years old, everyone else around was dead, with their heads cut off. Commander Ford pulled a gun on the screaming girl. “What have you done?”   
“Are you them?” she asked.   
“Am I who?” he asked back.   
“You’re not them. You can’t be them. But where are they?” she started working herself into more of a frenzy.   
Doctor Westphalen approached with a shot of thorazine, and injected the girl. They brought her to medbay, and restrained her to the bed.   
“Search the facility, see if there are any survivors,” Ford commanded, and the crew began walking through. 

All of a sudden, someone jumped at Chief Crocker, and Crocker could see a knife coming at his jugular. “Help!” he screamed, before reaching for his taser, and knocking the man unconscious. He handcuffed him, and dragged him back to the airlock. As Ford was returning to help Crocker, someone jumped out at him with a knife. He shot him with a stun gun, then handcuffed him and made his way back to Crocker. The two seaQuest crew members looked at each other, then at the two men they had stunned. “We need to get them back to the brig before they wake up,” Crocker said.   
“I agree, let’s go.” They loaded the two men on the shuttlecraft, and sat there with guns aimed at their heads until they could get to the seaQuest. 

Meanwhile, the 13 year old girl had woken up, and with the aid of some xanax, was making more sense. They had all been attacked by two men with knives. She wasn’t sure why she had survived, but she had set off the May Day alert. Then she hadn’t been able to stay near it to respond to seaQuest’s hails.


	66. Fail

Ben woke up with the alarm. “Today’s the day,” he said to himself, getting up and putting on his uniform. He finished getting ready, and then walked to the conference room. There would be a written exam, followed by an oral exam. If he passed, he could be next in line for a promotion to Lieutenant Commander. If he failed, he had one more chance and then he would need to find a new career. He had studied everything they had given him to study from UEO rules and regulations and standing commands to how the seaQuest was put together. Katie had helped him study that part, and she knew the ship better than almost anyone. He felt confident.   
He felt confident until he opened the test booklet, and read the first three questions. All of them were about security procedures aboard smaller submarines and floating ships. He hadn’t studied this. No one had suggested he should. He knew the seaQuest inside and out, but he hadn’t studied other ships. He panicked as he realized the entire test was more general knowledge of the navy than specific seaQuest information. He hadn’t looked at this since he was at the academy.   
After an hour, he filled in the questions he could, and then called the admirals for his oral exam. When it became clear to everyone that he was not prepared, they asked him why. When he explained they said, “if you were to achieve a higher rank, it would not be aboard the seaQuest. You need to know our entire fleet.”   
“Yes sir,” he said miserably.   
“Let Captain Bridger know when you are ready to retake this exam,” Admiral Noyce told him, “but you have failed today.”   
Ben closed the connection and put his head in his hands. He couldn’t believe he had failed. He had never failed anything in his life, and to fail something so important, it was unfathomable. And yet it was true.


	67. Confused

“These results make no sense,” Dr Westphalen complained to Lucas. He looked over her shoulder. She was right. The control group had changed color and grown as orange as the experimental group. “There’s no reason for the control to change color. Someone screwed up planting these,”   
“That’s the only reasonable explanation, but these were planted by three different people at three different times, and they’re all orange!”   
“Weird,” Lucas said looking at a tray. “I wonder if the control will fight cancer?”   
“I hope so, but we’ll never find out. We’ll have to redo this entire experiment so we get controls that actually look like Saint Johns Wart is supposed to.”   
“How long will that set us back?”   
“Ask how much that will set us back,” she answered. “It’s probably a $17,000 mistake.”   
“Ouch.” Lucas said, looking at the plants again.   
“This time I’ll do them all myself,” she said to herself.   
Lucas took it as his cue to leave, and Kristin began throwing out the ruined experiment. She threw everything into the trash shoot, including both the controls and experimental group. She began again with seeds of St Johns Wort, which she carefully inserted genes into half of the population. Then she planted them carefully in two trays.


	68. Smile

Katie was busy. She had a million things to do in Pearl Harbor, and only an hour to do them all. She was walking down the street when someone called out to her “hey, smile baby,” She scowled. “How dare you?” she yelled at him. “How dare you try to control me and my body? Maybe I don’t want to smile right now. Maybe I’m not happy right now. And yet you think I should smile to please you?”   
“Hey, hey, calm down baby, I was just saying you’d look amazing with a smile on your face.”   
“You are not making this better.” She snarled. “And stop calling me baby. I am not your baby.”   
“Bitch,” yelled the man.   
“That’s it,” Katie said taking three large steps up to him, and punching him in the nose.   
“Damn whore!” the man yelled, taking a swing, which Katie easily dodged. She grabbed the arm he was punching with and twisted it behind his back.   
“Apologize.” She said to him, yanking upwards on it.   
“Bitch!” He swore.   
“Wrong answer,” She spun him around and kneed him in the nuts, then kicked him, and walked away, actually smiling. “That was really satisfying,” she said to herself.


	69. Come

“Come on in, the water’s fine.” Lucas called to Ben. Darwin chirped in agreement. Lucas and Bridger were already in the water. Ben, Tim, and Miguel watched from the sidelines, and all decided to get in the water. Ben had a basketball, and they played three on three, with Darwin on Lucas and Bridger’s team. Ben’s team won handily, and then they started playing volleyball. Darwin was much better than a human at volleyball, and his team won easily. He laughed. “Hey Darwin,” Lucas asked, “can I grab your fin and let you swim around with me on your back?”   
“Yes” the dolphin said. Everyone backed up to the edge of the pool to allow space for this. Lucas grabbed Darwin and got dragged around the moon pool. Soon they were all taking turns riding Darwin who was chattering with laughter.   
“Relax,” Darwin said  
“Yes, buddy, it’s good to relax together sometimes,” Bridger said. Darwin squirted water at him, and he splashed the dolphin back. Darwin turned around, turning his tail to Nathan, and splashed him with his tail.   
“Alright! You win!” Nathan said, laughing, and rubbing the dolphin’s melon.  
“Bridger fun” Darwin announced, splashing him again.   
“You’re fun too, my friend,” Nathan said to him, ducking.


	70. Alone

“I’m all alone, in a crowded ship. I mean, I’m not. People go out of their way to include me, and I get a paycheck just like everybody else, but sometimes it feels like I am all alone here. I’ve always been all alone, from the time I was 12 and a freshman at Stanford. There was no one else my age around, and now everyone around me is adults. There’s no one else my age, and that makes me alone, no matter how much they try to include me.” Lucas typed into a blog he kept. His friends would read it, but probably no one would reply. People were notoriously bad at replying to negative comments that indicated any kind of depression, unless it sounded severe enough to be suicidal. But he wasn’t suicidal. He was just lonely. He finished up his blog post, and then logged onto the InterNex, and looked for Juliana. She replied quickly, and they talked about the dangers of being a genius and being out of college already by 16. At least someone else understood. No one around him understood, but Juliana and Nick did, and that was enough. It had to be enough.


	71. Fast

Katie lay in he bed. She wasn’t used to being able to be asleep at this hour, since it should be the middle of her shift. Today, however, was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and she could neither work nor eat nor drink for 25 hours. There was not a rabbi aboard the seaQuest, but one Temple in Atlanta broadcast their high holy day services online. She was waking up now to watch them. She turned the services on on her laptop. Thankfully, she was not orthodox, and could use technology on holidays. She pulled a siddur out from her locker, and turned the volume up. Most of the prayers said on high holy days were the same words but different tunes than those said on Friday nights, so she knew the words, if she could figure out what prayer was being said. This was more difficult than it sounded. 

The service started. Katie tried to read along, but her Hebrew reading was not fluent. She stumbled through the prayers, and enjoyed listening to the choir sing some of them beautifully. After the service she went back to sleep for a couple hours. The evening service began, and she watched it again. She looked at her own watch, and determined that she could eat again, so she went to the officers mess, and piled a plate full of spaghetti. “It’s certainly not like momma used to make,” she said looking at it, “but I guess this is the life I have chosen.”


	72. Slow

Nothing goes slowly aboard the seaQuest. Except for Dr. Westphalen’s experiments. Those seem to go more and more slowly as time goes on. Last time I checked with her, her controls had all turned orange, and she had vowed to redo the entire experiment by herself. Today, she is finishing those up, and we’ll see if there are results.  
Lucas walked down to the aqua lab, where he met Dr Westphalen and Dr Levin. Dr Levin was holding a pan of orange St Johns Wort, while Dr Westphalen had a much more normal looking tray. “Congratulations Doc!” Lucas said, upon seeing them. “Yes, thank you, but we’re still not sure if they’ll work to cure cancer,” the doc answered.   
“Well, now they can be tested, right?” he asked.   
“Yes, we’ll begin testing tomorrow.” She answered. 

The next day, Dr Westphalen was carefully extracting cancerous cells and putting them in petri dishes along with the leaves of the orange St Johns Wort.   
“Harvard medical center has had some great success with a similar experiment, except they used capsules instead of plants. I’m hopeful the addition of the plant will assist the drug and lead to a complete recovery.” She told Lucas.   
“What kind of cancer are we curing?” he asked her.   
“Breast cancer,” she said. “It’ll be months before we know anything though, and from there years before they’re ready for clinical trials.”


	73. Return

It was kind of like the end of high school, every year, Ben thought. Every year, most of the crew would come back, but a bunch would leave, and never be seen again. Sure, they’d promise to write, and they’d promise phone calls, but let’s be honest. These people would leave, and they’d lose contact completely. The more he thought about it, though, the more he wanted to be one of the ones leaving. The amount of trouble he’d had with his officer review from Commander Ford was really ridiculous, and he knew he wasn’t really wanted. Who could make a career out of being not really wanted? And Ford would give him trouble, like he always did, because he didn’t really want him around. So he thought about it and he thought he could maybe run a McDonalds. If he could find someone to recommend him for the job, and get hired. Some places specifically searched out veterans for managers of franchises, like he knew 7/11 did. So he thought maybe he could do a little research and find one of these jobs, and run his own business. It couldn’t be harder than being the supply and morale officer for the seaQuest.


	74. Fire

Bullets landed everywhere around the seaQuest crew. It was meant to be a routine mission. They had to bring 100 pounds of supplies to the waiting navy seals in Afghanistan. They thought they were going to a secure beach, but when they got there, they walked into a trap. Now there were weapons being fired in both directions. Tim kept his gun by his side, untrained on anybody. Then another round of shots fired, and Miguel yelled and collapsed. “No!” Tim yelled, standing up and firing for the first time since boot camp. He caught a young man who was probably only 12 years old in the chest. The boy fell and Tim watched him. “Oh no.” He thought, “oh no, I’ve killed a kid. How can I ever atone?” He knew he had to go to confession, but even there, he wasn’t sure God would forgive him. Killing was a big no no - one of the top ten, and he had just done it. He grabbed Miguel, and sat with him until the Seals came to their rescue, laying down ground cover so they could bring the supplies, and get a medic to the injured. As it turned out Miguel had been shot in the knee, and would almost surely recover completely.


	75. Positive

Kristin frowned. “I’m sorry, Miguel, it’s positive. You have mononucleosis”   
“How can that be? I haven’t kissed anyone. Isn’t that the kissing disease?”   
“It can also be transferred by sharing glasses, or other close contact. It’s not unique to kissing.” She told him  
“So what’s the prognosis, doctor?” he asked.   
“Well, you’ll probably be off work for a month, maybe longer, and you’ll feel about like you feel now the whole time.”   
He groaned. He felt pretty awful.   
“Try to sleep as much as you can, and don’t let anyone share your glasses or otherwise contact your spit.”   
“Sleep I can do,” he said, getting up and getting ready to walk back to his room for a nap. 

He was the 3rd case this week, and Kristin began to suspect an epidemic was going to go through the seaQuest. It was, as Miguel had intimated, hard to spread mono, but it wasn’t as hard as people thought it was so it sometimes spread through a ship or community unexpectedly. The two people who had it already were a romantic couple already so it was easy to see how it had spread from one to the other, but she didn’t even think Miguel knew either of them. They were 3rd shift crew who only worked at night. Kristin sighed. She called down to Bridger and told him he had to get his kitchen to be more responsible for cleaning their glasses. Miguel had probably picked it up either in the bathroom or in the kitchen.


	76. Baby

Katie looked at Ben. Ben looked at Katie.   
“I did always want to have a baby,” he said.   
“I always thought I’d have a baby. Just, not with you,” she answered.   
“Why not with me?” he asked.   
“You’re as big a kid as the baby would even be,” she said. “I couldn’t raise both of you.”   
“You wound me,” he said, grabbing at his chest as though he had been wounded by a knife.   
“No, it’s true, Ben. I need an equal at parenting, not someone who is going to try to be the fun older brother and leave the tough stuff to me.”   
“I would have been a good father,” he answered, looking away from her.   
“It’s easy to say that now,” she said, looking away, also. “But we would not have made an equal team.”   
“No, we never made an equal team, did we?” he mused.   
“No. I needed someone who was going to take being an officer seriously, and you needed…”   
“I take being an officer seriously,” he interrupted.   
“Ben, you’re the morale officer.”  
“Supply and morale. It’s an important job,” he was offended now. “Being underwater for a year at a time is tough on the psyche. I provide counseling services on top of being the supply officer,”  
“Ben, I know your job is important, and I know it was custom made for you. If you weren’t here, and we hadn’t been married, there would be no supply and morale officer aboard the seaQuest.”   
“Whatever.” He walked away.


	77. Upset

“Are you upset with me?” Ben asked.   
“I’m not upset with you,” Nathan replied  
“Then what?” Ben started.   
“You knew Lucas was going to a party, and not to a conference,” Nathan accused him.   
“I knew the girl was going to be there, but I didn’t know it was a party.” Ben tried to defend himself.   
“You always know what he’s up to,” Nathan said.   
“This time I didn’t. I might have suspected but Lucas is nerdy enough to go to a conference to meet a girl. You bought into it, too.”   
Nathan let the air out of his chest. “I did. And that’s what makes me the most angry. What if he’d gotten hurt? What if he’d killed someone joy riding like that? What if…”   
“You can’t let the what ifs get you like this. He didn’t hurt anyone, including himself, and it looks like he didn’t even have the sex he planned on, so chalk one up to youthful indiscretions, and let it go.” Ben suggested. “When I was his age, I used to sneak out the bedroom window, and drive with my girlfriend to have sex under a rock outcropping almost every night. It was stupid. If we’d been caught by the cops, I’d probably have a criminal record as a sex offender, but it was just a thing we did back then. It didn’t carry over into adult life.”   
“I guess you’re right. When I was his age, we used to go over to people’s houses when their parents were out of town, and get drunk. Still, I don’t think the police were ever called on us.”  
“You got lucky is what you got. The cops used to bust the underaged parties we had all the time.” Ben told him in no uncertain terms.   
“I guess you’re right. Thanks, Mister Krieg.” Nathan turned and walked away from the officer.


	78. Kitchen

“Do you think it’s real chicken?” Ben asked the table, poking at a chicken finger on his plate.   
“Sure, why wouldn’t it be? They outlawed beef, not all meat,” Tim pointed out taking a bite of his.   
“I know, but do they bother storing real chicken on a submarine that might be down for a year at a time?” he asked.   
“They get new food every month or so. It’s why we land at Pearl Harbor every month, You should know that. You’re the supply officer. Don’t you have to sign off on all the kitchen’s requests for food?” Katie asked.   
“I never pay attention to that. It comes in at about the same amount each month, and I figure the cooks know what they need,” Ben admitted. “There are a lot of supplies for this ship. Some things I just move right past.”   
“Well I’m sure you can find out if it’s real chicken on next month’s order. Just look at it.” Tim told him.   
“I will,” Ben admitted.   
“But anyway, I’m sure it’s real chicken. They’ve had chicken on subs long before beef was outlawed. They just freeze it. That’s why if someone dies and they need the freezer space for a body, there’s always lots of ice cream and beef.” Tim told everybody.   
“Ugh, I did not need that image,” Lucas complained.


	79. Winter

It was exactly 70 degrees on the submarine every day, summer, winter, fall, or spring. Plus, most of their stops were at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, where it was never cold. This made it difficult to remember your jacket when stopping over for a shore leave in Brisbane, in June. It shouldn’t be winter since most of the crew was from the northern hemisphere, and they were all accustomed to June being warm. But when they got off the shuttlecraft it was certainly winter. It was about 40 degrees, and Katie was wearing short sleeves. None of them were wearing jackets. “Let’s just find a bar, and get inside,” Katie suggested when they all started looking wistfully at the shuttle craft.   
“It’s a fine day for a jog,” Ben announced, and started running towards the city. Everyone quickly followed suite.   
They found a bar, and everyone except Lucas was allowed in. “Don’t worry about me,” he said, “I’m going to go find an arcade.” He hailed a cab and was gone. Everyone else stepped into the bar, and ordered a round of drinks. This was soon followed by another, then another, and finally everyone was drunk enough that they wouldn’t think the shore leave had been wasted. They walked out into the street, and ran back to the shuttle craft. Lucas was already there, sitting on the dock next to it. He looked at them all for a moment then announced, “I’m driving.” No one disagreed, so Lucas took the helm and drove everyone back to the seaQuest. It was the first time he’d driven since the accident, and he was nervous, but some things you never forget.


	80. Ignorant

“I think I liked it better when I was ignorant of all the pitfalls and traps of being a parent,” Nathan admitted to Crocker.   
“It can feel like that, sometimes, but overall you’re glad to have experienced parenting not only with Robert, but with Lucas, too,” Crocker told him.   
“You’re right. I just… I can’t believe I didn’t learn how to prevent this from the time Robert did the same thing.”   
“Kids do stupid things. Kids have always done stupid things. Let’s not act like we didn’t do some stupid things at the academy when we were kids,” Crocker reminded him with a smile. Nathan smiled, too, and then laughed. “Do you remember when we stole the drill instructor’s hat?” he asked.   
“God yes, and I thought we were going to die the next day when he smoked us until we told him where it was. I’d never exercised so hard I puked before that.” Crocker reminded him.   
“Natural consequences!” Nathan spit out, laughing.   
Crocker joined in the laughter, and then added, “you know, cap, there have been some natural consequences for Lucas, too. Having to pay off the ticket he got from the cop who pulled him over will eat into his paycheck for quite a while, and the increase in his insurance costs will haunt him for a while too.”   
“I know, but I’m more upset over the lying than the speeding and joy riding,” Nathan admitted. “I wish he had just told me the truth. I’d have let him go anyway.”   
“You should make sure he knows that. Have a conversation with him.”   
“You’re right. I’m on my way now.” Nathan said, as he walked away.


	81. Fool

“Sir,” Ben called out, “Are you going to sign my officer’s review form?”   
“No,” Commander Ford said simply.   
“I got top marks on both the written and the oral section. No one knows the seaQuest better than I do.”   
“But you’re a fool, Krieg. I don’t want to work with fools,” Jonathan told him. Ben looked down, and slumped his shoulders.   
“If I can prove to you that I deserve this…” he started.   
“You can’t,” Jonathan told him. “You’re just not the type of officer I like to work with.”   
“So that’s it. They’re just going to kick me out of here, and back to a less prestigious sub?” Ben asked  
“I guess so. You can get a reference from Captain Bridger to stay in the navy but I don’t want you here,” Jonathan told him.   
“Who are you going to get to be your supply and morale officer?” Ben asked him.   
“See, that’s just it. We don’t need a morale officer. I’ll get a supply officer who will do his job without all the antics.”   
“SeaQuest will be a sadder place,” he told Ford.   
“Not sadder. More professional. It will be a more professional place, and that is what the flagship of the UEO navy should be. It isn’t a kindergarten, Krieg.”   
“We submerge deeper and longer than any other submarine on the planet. That can get depressing. That’s why you have a morale officer. You need me.” Ben tried one last time.   
“No, Krieg. We don’t need you. We don’t need a morale officer.” Ford finished and walked away. “We’re done.” He said leaving.


	82. Afraid

“Are you going to lecture me, too?” Lucas asked Ben.   
“No, I figure Captain Bridger and the Doctor have done that,” he answered.   
“Then what?”   
“I came to offer my friendship. I know a lot of the adults are looking at you like you’re a dumb kid right now, but I want you to know I don’t think you’re dumb.” Ben answered.   
“Thanks, Ben. But I’m feeling pretty dumb right now,” he told him.   
“You did a dumb thing. But that doesn’t make you dumb. It just makes you young,” Ben told him.   
“Thanks.” Lucas said, looking away from him and down at his thumbs.   
“What do you say we go get dinner? I hear there’s birthday cake.”   
“Ben can I tell you something?” Lucas asked, “before we go?”   
“Sure.”   
“I have never been so afraid in my life. I knew I was drunk and I didn’t remember anything when I woke up except that suddenly I was on the surface in the stinger, and I had no idea how I’d gotten there or where I was. I wasn’t sure I’d ever find the seaQuest again or if I’d be welcome here when I did. I thought my life was ending, and I have never been so afraid,” he repeated.   
“I bet. But you are still welcome here, and you did find us again.”  
“I know, but I wasn’t sure.” Lucas said shuddering. Ben put his hand on Lucas’ shoulders. “How about that cake?” he asked.


	83. Prison

Tony frowned and paced his cell again. Up one wall, a 90 degree turn, down the next, a 90 degree turn, go around the toilet, and to the end of that wall, to the bed, and another 90 degree turn. He did this again and again. Prison was a small place, and he would do anything to get out. His prayers were about to be answered. There was a flyer with his dinner. Anyone willing to be experimented on by the UEO could get out of prison and into the military. He stared at it. He wasn’t sure the military was much better than prison, but at least he’d have free days in ports occasionally. Plus, it could be kind of cool to be an experimental ginny pig. He stared at the invitation again and again over the next three days that he had to debate this. He didn’t know what kind of experiment it would be, other than that it would certainly be dangerous, but it meant his freedom. It meant getting out of prison.  
When the warden came to ask for volunteers, Tony shot up his hand. “I’ll do it!” he announced. And his cell was unlocked.   
“You’ll be in the hospital for the better part of a year, but after that you’ll be put into the navy and deployed as a weapon.” He was told.   
“Anything. What’s the experiment?”   
“We’re going to give you gills,” the scientist told him.   
“Like a fish?”   
“Exactly like a fish” he was told, and then he was given a sedative and the first surgery began.


	84. Sex

“This submarine. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great, and I appreciate it, but sometimes I wish there were someone my own age around here anywhere.” Lucas complained.   
“What would you do with another 16 year old?” Bridger asked.   
“I don’t know. Get drunk. Have sex. Live a little,” Lucas suggested.   
“Lucas, your average 16 year old is still in high school. What would you even talk to them about?” Bridger asked.   
He stopped and thought about it for a moment.   
“Well I wish there were another smart 16 year old aboard.” He said, pouting a little.   
“I think you underestimate how hard it is to find a smart 16 year old whose parents don’t want them with them” Bridger told him.   
“There were all those kids at node 3” Lucas objected.   
“And look what happened to them.” Nathan finished for him.   
Lucas shrugged. Most of them were still at Node 3, just with some actual adult supervision now. Lucas wasn’t sure that was a bad thing right now. Although he’d decided to go back to the seaQuest, sometimes he wished he were still at node 3 with those other kids having fun and working on worthwhile projects.   
“I think you’ve had enough getting drunk for a while, anyway,” Nathan said.   
Lucas had the good graces to look sheepish.


	85. Hate

“I hate having to rely on an adult to drive me anywhere,” Lucas complained.   
“You brought that on yourself,” Tim told him.   
“I know but still, it feels so infantilized.” He complained.   
“What did you expect to happen?” Tim asked him.   
“Nothing. I don’t remember deciding to drive drunk. I don’t remember anything of that day, except waking up on the surface.” Lucas admitted. He frowned, “It’s such a stupid thing to do, yet so easy to do it.”   
“And it’s so easy to accidentally kill someone doing it” Tim told him.   
“I know.” Lucas put his head in his hands. “At least that didn’t happen,”   
“Small favors.” Tim said.   
“I’d say that’s a large favor” Lucas said.   
“You should say a prayer of thanks” Tim told him.   
“Prayer is not the answer for me,” Lucas told him. Tim frowned. “I think it might help you,” he said.   
“You have to be honest with yourself though, Faith is an example of lazy thinking and allowing yourself to believe what you want to believe instead of what your brain can prove is true.” Lucas said.   
“Prayer is talking to your maker” Tim said, feeling a little insulted.   
“Prayer is talking to yourself,” Lucas countered. “It works, when it does, because it encourages you to put energy towards what you’re praying for.”   
“Prayer is not a vending machine” Tim said.  
“Funny, that. You should tell most believers in it that.” Lucas countered.


	86. Alarm

“Red alert. Red alert. Red alert” The alarm continued to repeat. People were running every which direction, most of them making their way to the bridge, but others heading for the moon pool, and every available exit. Lucas ran for his own room. He was just supposed to stay out of the way.   
“Impact imminent. Impact Imminent” the alarm began to repeat again. Lucas sat on the floor until the ship shook, and he stood back up and made his way back to mammal engineering.   
“Red alert. Red alert. Red alert” began sounding again. He lay on his bed, and called for Darwin. The dolphin came up to him, and squealed.   
“How you doing, Darwin?” he asked.   
“Darwin scared.” The dolphin said.   
“Yeah, Lucas too.” Lucas admitted.   
“Bridger fall. Darwin scared.” The dolphin said.   
“Bridger fell? Is he alright?” Lucas asked, suddenly concerned. He really hoped Bridger was still in command of the ship.   
“Yes, Bridger stand.” Darwin said.   
Lucas breathed a sigh of relief.   
The red alert ended, and the lights turned a gentle white again. Ford’s voice came over the intercom ordering a boarding party to meet at launch bay.   
“Where’s Bridger?” Lucas thought, scared again. He made his own way to the bridge, but on his way he passed Bridger. He was walking on his own but looked a little dazed. He was heading to Dr. Westphalen’s office. Lucas walked with him the rest of the way.


	87. Genius

Lucas stared at his computer, with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. He was on the trail of a virus, and no one else could find what he was looking for. Bridger brought food, but it lay uneaten next to him. Whenever he had a good puzzle to work on, he was impossible to distract. A few hours later he took a few bites of the pizza Bridger had left, but his eyes never left the screen. He typed quickly, without looking. Suddenly, red lights started flashing. “Shit” Lucas said. “Dogs.” If he messed with it any farther, he could destroy the whole sub starting with life support. He frowned and called the bridge.   
“Can you get it if we dry dock?” Bridger asked.   
“Yes. Probably. Yes. Well I certainly can’t get it without dry docking.” He thought about it.   
“Alright, we’ll head to Pearl Harbor as soon as we can.” Nathan told him. “Just sit tight. Don’t touch anything.”   
Lucas went into the mess hall and got some macaroni and cheese. Tim met him there. “I hear you found a virus.”   
“Yeah, this one isn’t as targeted as the last one, but it could allow someone to take control of our navigation system” he said.   
“You can fix it?” Tim asked.   
“I can fix anything.” Lucas said.


	88. Negative

“Now who’s being a negative Nancy?” Ben teased Tim.   
“I’m not being a negative Nancy. I’m just pointing out the flaws in your plan,” Tim protested.   
“Flaws in my plan? It’s a brilliant plan!” Ben objected hotly.   
“Your plan is to carry a catfish in your pants through security and onto the seaQuest just so you can eat fresh fish, and you don’t think the scent is going to draw attention to what you’re doing?”  
“Yes, it works at the hockey rink,” Ben tried defending himself.   
“That’s because they know it’s coming and don’t really try too hard to stop it. They just think it’s funny there. But Bridger won’t be as amused with you smelling of fish or smelling of cooking fish. Besides, how do you plan to cook the thing once you get it aboard?” Tim asked him.   
“I’ll burn my Nolan Ryan III bat, and cook it up like a barbecue.” Ben told him.   
“Fire is the number one danger on board a ship. By a long shot. We’ve got fire alarms and sprinklers running into every room, and even if we didn’t messing around with fire is stupid. You’ll get smoke in the air filters, if nothing else. And you could burn the whole ship, it could easily and quickly get out of control. This is stupid.” Tim insisted.   
“I just want some fresh, unfrozen meat. Is that so bad?” Ben asked.   
“No, but let’s go to a restaurant the next time we’re at Pearl Harbor and get some sushi or something. Let’s not sneak a fish in our pants and light a fire to get it.”   
Ben deflated, “fine. Next time we’re in port, though, we’re getting fresh meat.”


	89. Flood

“Flood all tubes,” Captain Bridger called into the air on the bridge.   
“Flooding all tubes, aye” the weapons officer called back, as he pushed a few buttons.   
“Target their propulsion system,” he called out, and there was another flurry of activity throughout the bridge. “20% charge,” he ordered, causing more activity.   
“Sir, if we only hit them with a 20% charged torpedo, we’ll barely disable them,” Commander Ford whispered to him.   
“I know that. Robbery still doesn’t carry a death penalty, even under water,” Bridger whispered back.   
“And what about justice for the man they killed at Gentle Valley farming community? Did he get mercy?” Ford asked.   
“So we’ll arrest them all and charge them with first degree murder. He’ll get his justice from the justice system, not from me acting alone,” Nathan answered.   
“Ready to fire,” announced the weapons officer.   
“Fire at will,” Bridger ordered, and immediately two torpedoes left the boat and found the propulsion unit on the smaller submarine. There was a flash of fire, and then the ship began to sink.   
“Board that boat. Rescue everyone aboard,” Bridger ordered, “place them under arrest and bring them back here.”   
Below him at launch bay, there was a rush of people running around, and leaving in a shuttle craft.


	90. Bomb

“What is that?” asked Commander Ford as he looked at the sonar screen in front of him.   
“I think it’s a nuke on a chain,” answered Miguel Ortiz.   
“A nuke on a chain? Are they crazy?” Ford asked, more rhetorically than demanding an answer. The little suitcase sized bomb swung back and forth from behind a ship on the surface. If It hit the seaQuest, or anything else, it would go off, destroying them immediately, but it would also destroy the surface vessel. It was suicidal. It also answered the question of how North Korea would deliver a nuke since its missiles kept failing. It would just dangle it over the open ocean until someone or something hit it. It was kind of genius, in that crazy genius type of way that usually made for a bad villain in a superhero movie.   
“Can we defuse it?” Ford asked Miguel.   
“I wouldn’t recommend it sir,” Miguel answered. “One wrong move and all fish go extinct.”   
“But we can’t just leave it there. Someone might hit it,” Ford answered him.   
“We might detonate it,” Miguel told him, “But we can grab it and bring it aboard for a bomb squad to take apart.”   
“What are our chances of success?” Ford asked.   
“About 75%” he answered.   
“Do it,” he ordered, and Miguel fired a soft net to grab the bomb.


	91. Hospital

“Red Alert. Red Alert. Red Alert” Announced the disembodied voice over the ship wide intercom. Lucas began running for his own room. As he was running, he tripped on his own shoelace, and sprawled across the floor. He tried to pick himself up and wound up screaming in agony. He couldn’t use his arm to get up. He choked back a sob of pain until he couldn’t anymore, and then he sat on the floor and sobbed.   
A passing crew member stopped his own running to ask if Lucas was okay. He only shook his head. “Okay, I’m going to go in by the moon pool and call Doctor Westphalen,” the man said, leaving Lucas alone again.   
A few minutes later, Kristin appeared. Lucas was a blubbering mess on the floor by that time, though it was probably only two minutes or so. The red alert was still going off, and crew was running, trying desperately to avoid Lucas and Kristin on the floor. Kristin gave Lucas a shot of a pain killer, and then convinced him to walk. They walked back to med bay, where she took x-rays of the arm. “Well, you’ve broken it,” she said to him. “You’re lucky. SeaQuest has just gotten the ability to make casts that allow most of the skin to see air flow. Hopefully it won’t itch as much.” She said as she began wrapping his arm in the cast. “You’ll have to let me know how this works,” she said, as she finished up. “I’ll give you some Vicodin. You can take one every four hours, and not a minute sooner,”   
“Thanks, Doc,” he said  
“You’re welcome. Now you just sit there. We don’t need you getting in the way of the military’s red alert again,” she thought aloud. Just as she said it, the red alert was cancelled, and people began walking back to their rooms to go back to bed, or whatever they had been dragged away from by the alert. Lucas stood up, took the bottle of pills, and went back to show off his new cast in the crew mess hall.


	92. Trap

Tim, Miguel, and six other members of the seaQuest crew ran through the jungles of Viet Nam. They were chasing after El Chapo, a Mexican drug lord they all believed had come ashore to purchase drugs in the rainforest. They had been tracking him under water for weeks and the UEO had been after him for months before that. They were on a mission with shoot to kill orders, as El Chapo was considered to be extremely dangerous.   
All of a sudden, there were guns firing at them from all sides.   
“It’s a trap!” Tim yelled, hitting the ground. Miguel and the others followed him to the ground. He called for an air strike in the area, and the air force came in and lit the area up, but instead of people, all they found were makeshift traps with strings that the seaQuest crew had run through setting them off automatically.   
“He really knew what he was doing,” Miguel spat out.   
“And we fell for it entirely too easily,” one of the other men said, as everybody nodded.   
“He’s long gone by now,” Tim said, looking around. They could only see about 10 feet in front of them, but there were no signs of which way then hunted man may have gone.


	93. Celebrate

The crew was gathering together to celebrate as Christmas came near. Everyone except for Lucas was in a good mood, decorating a tree in the mess hall, which stood right beside the missing soldier’s table. Nathan was watching Lucas carefully. Finally, he just asked, “Okay, you’re going around like someone kicked your dog. What’s wrong?”   
“Nothing!” Lucas snapped, louder than he meant to.   
“Now I really don’t believe it,” Nathan told him. “Come on, what’s wrong?”  
“Christmas is just another reminder that my parents don’t care. All through school other kids would go places with their parents, and have huge Christmas dinners. And I’d eat with the au pair or as I got older, by myself. They didn’t even bother to pay for a plane ticket for me to come home when I was in college or grad school.”   
“Well, I can’t make up for your childhood, but I’m here now. How would you like to come have Christmas dinner with myself and Kristin?”   
“Really?” Lucas asked.   
“Absolutely,” Nathan said.   
“Kristin won’t mind?” he asked.   
“No, I’ll just tell her we’re both on our way now,” Nathan answered. 

So Nathan and Lucas went to the officer’s mess where they met Kristin. The cooks had made turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and sweet potatoes, along with a green bean casserole. The three raised their glasses. “To another year,” they said. Then Lucas said, “to family” and they drank.


	94. Old

“Crocker!” Nathan called out to his old friend. “I have something for you, come to my room.” The two men walked together to the captain’s bedroom. He opened the door, and opened a drawer on his desk and pulled out a small wrapped package.   
“What’s this?” Crocker asked.   
“Open it,” was the only reply he got, so he opened it. He found a silver watch inside. He put it on his wrist.   
“Twenty five years in the navy, Congratulations!” Bridger said with a smile.   
“Twenty five years. So it has been. We’re getting old,” he said with a sad smile.   
“Hey, this is cause to celebrate!” Nathan said, pouring his friend a shot glass of whiskey.   
“I always thought I’d have a wife and kids by this point,” Crocker said, as he shot his whiskey down.   
“Me too,” Nathan said, following him.   
“Well, what are two old men good for?” Crocker asked, rhetorically.   
“Hey, two old men are good for saving the world at least another time or two,” Nathan answered anyway. Crocker looked at him and smiled. Nathan said, “come on down to the crew mess. I’ve had the chefs make you a cake.”   
“Oh, God, Cap!” his friend said, but he was laughing.


	95. Disappear

Lucas watched the explosion that finished off the seaQuest, and with it any research he had not uploaded to the cloud. The vocorder was gone, and although he knew how to rebuild it, he knew it would be 3 years before he had another working one, with Darwin to share it with. He was afraid he wouldn’t have Bridger to share the next one with. Could he keep Darwin, without Bridger? He wasn’t sure what would happen to the dolphin now that there was no seaQuest, and there was no Bridger. Kristin was standing in the surf staring out at the same explosion everyone else was watching. She had just allowed herself to admit her feelings for the captain, and now, there was no way to survive that, was there? She had lost probably a month’s worth of data, and all her experiments, but that didn’t matter, right now, did it? She’d trade a year’s worth of data for Nathan to be alive.   
Crocker stood in a group of crew members, who all looked a little lost. They’d all lost any items of sentimental value they’d had aboard the seaQuest to keep them company while they were away from home and loved ones. One of the men was crying, and Crocker was at a loss as to what to do for him. Sea chanties didn’t seem like quite the thing to do this time.   
Then, off in the distance, could it be? Lucas thought he saw movement. He looked again, and it was certainly the Stinger! Bridger had survived. It had to be a miracle, because that was the only explanation.


End file.
